End of semester thoughts

I feel like by now it’s been too long to be even be wasting words trying to explain my absence around here. The important thing is, yes, I’m still alive… thank god.

Even more importantly, I’m concerned about looking ahead and hitting the reset button. I miss blogging. I miss writing for myself and I miss not caring what other people think of me.

Also, there comes a time when you gotta just shut up and write because you either do that and fuck it up, or you never write again. I am more afraid of the latter than the former.

My first semester of uni proved to be a big challenge, a new adventure and finally, the best experience I’ve had in my general life for a while.

I spent most of last year alone, with no real friends. I experienced loneliness, along with boredom, feeling trapped and lost. I couldn’t wait for last year to be over and for good reason. It was just a year too long in high school.

But now I’m a uni student in the big city and its bloody awesome! I’ll admit, at the beginning it was hard. But I think what we can learn from this is that all things are hard in the beginning and sometimes it takes somebody to stand up and say “Hey! I’m here! This is me” for people to get the message and then things eventually fall into place.

After my talk in front of my cohort, things certainly changed for the better. People started talking to me, I made a group of really cool friends (I even had three of them over the other week for a final assessments’ study sesh. Oh, and they all met my family… I think it’s getting serious… shit, am I ready for this?).

In all seriousness, as I told my old teachers when I went back to visit my high school recently, I am in a much happier place than I was this time last year. I have found my tribe… finally.

Not only has my social life actually had some action, uni itself has been pretty awesome too. My journalism course is amazing and so are all my lecturers. I love the content and even the assessments. I recently wrote a reflection for my last assessment where I had to identify the challenges I faced with the assessments. I commented that despite the challenges, I was able to embrace them in the end because this is what I really want to do, and the challenges are what make it interesting.

I realise I’m one of the few lucky people in the world who have always known what I’ve wanted to do. I’m also lucky that I got into my first preference course of RMIT journalism, and that it turned out to be the right choice.

These past couple months have solidified my passion and determination to become a journalist. In my first semester of studying my craft, I got to not only witness but report on a federal election. I also encountered debates about journalism and representation of minority groups (which is what sparked my last post). I’ve seen students as young as 15, protesting against ADANI and climate change. Most recently the widespread debates on freedom of the press in the wake of the AFP raids in ABC’s Sydney newsrooms. This solidified for me even further, just how important journalists are in our country’s democracy and in all nations across the world.

I am so excited, lucky and proud that one day (if not now), I get to call myself a journalist and hopefully become one of the greats of our generation.

Okay maybe that’s a bit too much… but I’m excited ya’ll!

I wanna change the world someday. I’m more sure of that than anything.

I’m excited about my career. I’m excited about my personal life and friendships. Life has been good to me. I feel like now, life is giving me an opportunity to do things, make things, change things and begin again.

It’s time to take on the world.

That’s all I wanted to say for now, see you soon…