Meeting Your Idols

If you know me through my tumblr, you’ll know I’ve been watching youtube for a few years and I’m pretty much in love with certain youtubers. Throughout my youtube-loving life, I’ve been a huge fan of multiple people; mainly loving the vloggers or beauty gurus.

Another fact to mention is that I live about 30 minutes from Brighton.

People always say they meet youtubers and are so surprised by how nice they are, but it’s never something I really thought about - not many of my favourite youtubers live near me and I’d never go to SITC or any meetups, they’re generally not my scene.

However, today I thought I’d share with you the two times I have been lucky enough to bump into those youtubers I’ve aspired to.

Back in June 2014, me and my friends were going to college (I went to college in Brighton last year), so we were at the train station having got the train from my home town. If you’ve ever been to Brighton station, you’ll know there are some shops around the outside which can be accessed both inside and outside the station. While my friends were getting their lunch from Marks and Spencer, one of my other youtube-loving friends noticed Alfie [Deyes] (pointlessblog), nudging me, we questioned if we should go up and speak to him or not. Before we had decided, he was in the queue and paying for his own items, so we decided to leave him be and wander around the station for a while. As he left the shop, we decided we should speak to him - what’s the harm in asking for a picture? He waited for his train to the side of the station and we went up to speak to him, telling him we were subscribers and loved his videos. He was extremely happy to see us, stood with skateboard and sunglasses in hand. We spoke about how he was going to London and America the next day, how he had broken his sunglasses and had no idea where to get them fixed. As it approached the time we needed to get going to college, we asked for pictures and said our goodbyes. We spoke for about five minutes and throughout he was really nice, polite and seemed to honestly enjoy speaking to us. It was strange to be speaking to someone with over a million subscribers and who I had been watching on my laptop/phone screen for a few years but it was nice to be greeted with a smiling face and a personality exactly the same as the one I had loved on youtube.

Fast forward to April 2015, me, my cousins and a friend go shopping in Brighton. Just to go shopping as it’s half term and it’s sunny. Me and my cousin separate from my other cousin and our family friend and we wander around the shops and laines for a while. As we end up in boots, we realise we’ve done everything we’ve wanted to do and there’s nowhere left for us to go. Heading to the photo department for somewhere to sit down, we wait for our friend to ring us back and sit chatting. Just as our friend rings us back, my cousin looks at me (she was facing the door and I was facing her) and says ‘is that Zoë’, I laugh at her statement as I thought she was joking - we had previously joked about meeting Zoë that day. As I turn round, I have to double take, there she is just walking into boots; looking absolutely flawless. Dressed in a maxi length dress and denim jacket, she looks great. We wait while she gets her photos processed and walk up to her after she takes a photo with another girl. We say ‘hi’ and ask if it would be okay to get a photo, she says ‘of course’ and takes the selfie on my cousins phone, saying it was nice to meet us as she does so. Walking away, me and my cousin are speechless - did we really just meet Zoella?! We call our friend back in excitement, the excitement which continues through the day. Meeting Alfie was one thing, but Zoella with her 7million+ subscribers, own book, own beauty brand, it’s a crazy world. 

I just want to leave with the fact they were both incredible to meet. They were both lovely and so sweet, neither of them seemed at all agitated upon meeting fans and having photos taken - in fact, most people point out how Zoë looks more excited in the photo than we do. It’s a strange world but I truly hope one day you meet the people who’ve inspired you or made you the person you are today. Whether it be idols or internet friends.

Five Years Time

A question everyone will get asked at multiple points in their life is ‘where do you see yourself in 5/10/20 years time?’, especially in your teen years as you’re approaching ‘adult life’. To be completely honest, it’s something I’ve been asking myself for the past year or two.

Where will I be in five years?
What will I be doing in ten years?
But, thinking about it, it’s such a crazy question. Who could possibly say where they’d be in five or ten years, let alone looking forward twenty years.

In five years time, I’ll be 23, mid twenties (ish), I can tell you where I’d like to be, but not where I see myself being. In five years, I’d like to be studying in America, I want to be content with life and I want to have travelled, not a crazy amount, but just a few more places. I want to have been to New York and explored art museums. I hope to have been to London some more, I live so close to London but the opportunity to go rarely arises. I also want to be a lot further through any writing projects I have at the moment.

In ten years time, I’ll be twenty eight, hitting my late twenties. I hope to be living in, or around, New York (the state, not the city, though the city would be incredible). I hope to be an author, but maybe with a more convincing, safe job on the side. I can definitely say I won’t be a published author by twenty eight, so maybe writing will be more of an aside. I hope to have my own apartment, flat or something to call my own. Whether I’m living there alone, with a friend or a partner, I just want somewhere to call my own. I hope to have travelled more, just around America, maybe I’ll have been to California or Nevada. I hope to have completed more of my bucket list, maybe it’ll be nearly done by now.

In twenty years time, I’ll be thirty-eight and that’s nearly forty and that’s quite scary. Maybe I’ll have a family, I would like to by that age. Maybe I’ll have moved out of New York into another state and own my own house, or maybe I’ll still be in New York. Perhaps, I’ll have moved back to England (though, I don’t really want to). I think by that age, the only thing I can really ask for is a happy, healthy family.

I can say all this, I can have all these ambitions but something could happen tomorrow that could change one or all of these things. Anything could happen along the way that would make me have to adjust or completely change these plans. That’s what scares me. Nothing in life is certain and it makes it hard to have ‘plans for the future’. 

Saying that, I believe that everyone should have plans; if you don’t have plans you have nothing to aim for. Stumbling aimlessly through life seems scarier than aiming to be somewhere. Even if your situation changes along the way, even if your dreams change along the way, always have them. Always aspire to be somewhere, be something, be someone.

This leads me to the question, where would you like to be in five years time?

“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” - Walt Disney.

Unmotivated

Recently I’ve been reading a lot.

Blogs, poems, books and the occasional fan fiction (guilty)!

This is great, I love reading and I love the pros that come with it - enjoyment, escaping reality and expanding my vocabulary - the downside? It makes me feel bad about my own writing, it makes me doubt my own ‘talent’.

It’s that feeling when you’re not even good at the one thing you’re good at. I guess writing has always been that thing that I’ve constantly wanted to do, constantly been inspired to do, I’ve always wanted to create a piece a writing, be it write a new blog post, start a new story, attempt a novel or try poetry. Writing has been the one thing that I’ve thought about as both a hobby and a career prospect but sometimes I read other people’s writing and I see how good they are and how well they use language; then I look at my writing and feel genuinely discouraged.

I can’t fluently express a point in a way other people can, I can’t use the same words in the way other people can. It’s as if they’re using this beautiful language and mine is plain, boring and dull. Okay, maybe those words all mean the same thing or have the same connotations but it’s how I feel.

Something I’ve always struggled with is comparing myself to others and silently competing with other people, I constantly feel like I should be as good as other people whether they’ve been practicing something the same length of time as me or they started five years before me.

I didn’t write for a long time in high school, there’s no real reason for this, I just didn’t. It’s left me feeling like I’ve missed out on a chunk of my writing ‘career’ that could otherwise have really changed me as a writer, had I constantly written through those four years (sorry to the rest of England who are at high school for five years, my town is quirky (or just stupid)) then maybe I’d be better, maybe I’d be at a different stage to where I am now, maybe I’d have finished a novel. Four years is a long time and to have missed out on writing for that long, to have missed out on a true passion of mine, is disheartening. It’s not as though I’ve only just got into writing, in fact I have the first ‘story’ I wrote in my bedroom, it’s about seven A4 sides long but I worked hard on it and sometimes I enjoy reading it just to see how far I’ve come.

Maybe it’s because I’m used to my own writing or because I write it myself that I think it’s not good enough but then that seems ridiculous because I’ll often write something that I’m really proud of and I honestly do think is good.

Maybe it’s good that we often become unmotivated with things we long because perhaps periods of distaste for our own work can, in reality, motivate us to do better. I know that after a certain amount of time of not writing I become overly motivated to write a load of things that have been floating around my mind, things almost boil up in my mind and I just want to write about every idea I’ve had.

In the end, I love writing and I wouldn’t stop for the world.

And that’s why I always come back to this blog, it’s like coming home after a holiday or some cliché like that.

I hope that explains why I’ve been gone for a few weeks, also this is an ‘I’m back now (potentially) post’!

Lastly, I have something a little different prepared for next week (she says) so you should all be excited for that - I’m scared but kind of excited *insert all happy and scared and wink emojis*!