How I became friends with the gas man.

I have lived away from home now for a year, exactly a year and I have completely changed. I now have bills in my name and have to budget very carefully in order not to end up eating only plain pasta. This dramatic change means it is bizarre to go home and see the friends that have not yet left. They are who I was a year ago. I am not sure what it is that changed, it’s not an external feature that is instantly recognisable, but I have a feeling it is a new found maturity. It’s not that I feel more mature but maybe it just comes with this new independence; like a free gift for getting this far. Either way they are the old me and I am the future them.

Since being away I, to my mother’s horror have developed a taste for alcohol and not just wine, spirits. This doesn’t make me sound like the classiest of all young ladies but that is just what has happened. When at home my mother will tell me not to drink to much when I go out, I will ignore her and end up not remembering leaving the venue I was drinking in, turn up the next morning clear as day without a hangover confusing my mother in the process. She knows I drank a lot by the Facebook statuses all spelt incorrectly the night before but I seem fine on the outside. The truth is, I am fine. I do not get hangovers, unless my drink is spiked (which only happened once) apart from this I fall asleep after drinking and wake up ready for the day, seriously. One day it will hit me and I will want to die but for now I will jump out of bed as I do most mornings and not think about it just incase by thinking about it sets it off.

The thing about moving away from home is the sudden realisation of...No Rules. Apart from the rules society obviously and clearly states. But I mean now, It doesn’t matter what time I come home; it doesn’t matter if I have been smoking socially whilst I have been out, pontificating over the way our parents influence us in the early stages of development; it doesn’t matter if I vote differently to my family and it doesn’t matter if I forget I am a catholic. I was brought up in a middle class, catholic, fairly conservative household. Yet now I am gone it is different. I don’t agree with a lot of what the government say anyway, I am paying £9000 a year to be in University for only 8 hours a week, so I certainly have less faith in what they “propose” yet I am definitely not conservative. I may have gone to church when I was little but I have very little want to go now. The idea of faith confuses me just as much as politics does; If for example I believe in God, then why do I have to go to church each week to lament the fact that I believe in him, the process of belief is surely strong enough for this not be necessary. Either way I am not my mother/grandmother/father; scientifically I am a model made from bits and pieces of them but unfortunately only I will control what I believe and do. Which I think has to be the scariest thought of a parent. You can control every little part of a child’s life when they are growing up but they will eventually forget all the things that they were told were right and wrong and do whatever they see fit.