Today I’m going to be talking about something a bit personal. Don’t worry – it’s nothing too TMI! I’ve been reflecting quite a lot recently about life changes that have been going on in my life and how I’m in a sort of transitional phase at the moment.
The past year has seen so many changes in my life. Graduating from uni, leaving Scotland to move to London and starting my first full time job post-University have made my life so different and it all seems to have happened so quickly! I feel like I’ve had to properly grow-up in a short space of time.
I feel like this blog post might end up like a bit of a brain-dump, so if that isn’t your sort of thing I do apologise. Just have scroll through these nice outfit photos I took last week!
Uni is over.
This is a life change that I feel like I’ve fully accepted. My course was 5 years long. Yeah that’s right, I was a student for 5 bloody years. That’s a long time and by the end of it I was just ready to move onto something else. But at the same time, there are going to be aspects of my student life that I will miss.
I’ll definitely miss the flexibility I had in my day-to-day life; being able to go to the gym when I wanted, working from home, having a lot more time to dedicate to blogging. It’s a lifestyle that I would love to get back someday, but I don’t think that’ll happen for quite a long time!
My uni days are definitely something I’ll look back on with a lot of fondness. Those 5 years have been the best of my life so far for sure – way, way better than my High School experience! But I’m also really looking forward to the rest of my twenties and this next phase of life that I’ve just begun.
Moving to London
After talking and preparing for it for months, I’ve finally moved to London! I’m not gonna lie, it was really stressful making the move down here. May, June & July were so busy for me and trying to prepare to move to a completely new city on top of that was just not fun.
But I’m here now and I’m feeling much more settled into life here. It’s weird because I’ve just got used to it so quickly and I’m not really missing home too much yet. The only thing I’m missing is how cheap Scotland is – while my London life might look glam on Instagram, believe me when I say that I am completely broke!
Now that I’m settled into our flat, my next plan is so get the decor sorted out. It’s much more difficult to make time to do up the flat now that I work full time, so it’s going to be quite a long process. But my goal is that by mid-September we have the place looking a lot nicer (and tidier!).
Working Full Time
So I’ve now been working in ‘the real world’ for around a month. I feel incredibly lucky to have got a job literally immediately after I graduated (I got the call to say I got the job the day after my graduation ceremony) because I was expecting to be jobless for a little bit longer to be honest.
I was so worried that I wasn’t going to find a job after I graduated, and it was something that really played on my mind all throughout my 5th year of uni. I got filled with so much self-doubt, especially after being rejected from every grad scheme I applied to, that I had convinced myself I was unemployable. It was so silly, now that I think back on it, but leaving Uni is such an emotional and scary time because you just don’t know what is going to happen once you go into ‘the real world’.
But it all worked out for me in the end! I’m now working in the wine trade, within the marketing department of a wine and spirits merchant to the on-trade. I’m loving the job so far because my team are all so, so nice and the work is quite varied so I’m not doing exactly the same thing every day. I also get to drink a lot of nice wine, so that is definitely a perk!
Transitioning into adulthood?
This is something that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot recently. When I was moving to London and preparing to start my new job, I felt like I was about to start a whole new phase of my life. My god, that sounds so cringe to say that, but it’s true.
Now that uni is over, I’m starting to be fully independent and I guess responsible. I’m having to budget my money, I’m saving (very slowly) to buy my first property, I’m starting to seriously think about where I want my career to go. Then there’s also the other side of things where I’m thinking about when I’ll get married, have kids, move to the countryside and live happily ever after (ha!). I’m definitely feeling more like an adult than ever before.
The surprising thing is, I kind of like it. Sure, there are some times when I think about how care-free my life was when I was younger, but it feels nice to start taking more responsibility. I’m definitely far off from ‘having my shit together’, but I am really looking forward to the rest of my twenties and working all that stuff out (..and hopefully having a lot of fun along the way).
Let me know if you’ve ever felt like you’ve gone through a time where a lot has changed and how you’ve dealt with it. I always feel like I get so much wisdom through the comments on this blog!