2011, more than any other year, was a year of contradictions for me.

This was the year I turned a quarter of a century, and when I was younger I assumed all 25-year-olds know everything and have their lives sorted… How wrong I was!

When I’ll look back at this year, my memories at first might be overcast with the sheer bleakness that dominated the news: more focus on the recession, more unrest around the wold, and a surprisingly high level of ignorance than I’d ever thought possible!

This year has been one of trying to stay strong in the face of horrible twists of fate for me. People I’d started to get used to having around left the country for new jobs or adventures. I took on a new challenges at work which I had never envisioned at the start of the year. And to top it all, many of my friends went through tough experiences that tried even my unfaltering optimism that good things DO happen to good people.

And as hard as this is to admit, I realised more than ever that seeing the best in people can come back to haunt you. People who I viewed as ‘not like the rest’ turned out to be more cowardly, selfish and hurtful than I’d ever thought possible, and if I’m honest this is the year more than ever that I’ve started to realise truly honest people are a rare breed. I also learnt that settling and overlooking deal-breakers in a man is never worth it, it’s plain self-harming! Allowing yourself to fall for someone you know isn’t actually good enough for you means you’re only setting yourself up for disaster further along the line. 

This was also the year I travelled abroad four times, and I learnt so much from each experience! Berlin was intense in its raw cityscape, shattered from the violence of the past and yet it managed to impress upon me an unforgettable adventure in music, history and the brilliant sense of freedom that comes with living the life of a traveller, no matter how short the actual trip.

Valencia seduced me with its lush gardens, idyllic and uncrowded beach; the slow pace was just what I needed to confront me with the realisation that life doesn’t have to be as frantic and isolating as London would have you suggest.

Bali and its islands were diverse in their beauty and ability to blow you away. The Balinese people were so damn happy, and can you blame them considering how stunning their homeland is?!

Amsterdam, like Berlin, instilled in me a sense of fun and freedom so easily lost when your life is dominated by a 9-5 existence. Relatively small, the city did make me appreciate the London sprawl but I envy the lifestyle of late starts and nonchalant commutes cycling across cobbled streets.

As well as travels, I feel like I’m starting to realise what I want more from life than ever before. I guess that’s an inevitable part of getting older, but this I what I’ve learnt in 2011:

+ I need to have more faith in my ability to take on anything thrown my way.

+ I will always, always have the travel  bug and need to succumb to it far more often than I already do

+ This year I’ve been deceived and lied to, pickpocketed, evicted and screwed over a few times, but I honestly believe bad times need to be experienced to appreciate the good.

+ Life doesn’t follow any logic and people aren’t as clear-cut as we’ve been led to believe. In essence, we really are all just a jumbling mass of molecules struggling to make sense of who we are and what we’re supposed to do with our short stay on this big chunk of rock!

+ Getting my phone stolen taught me that as a generation we’re so more reliant on technology than we ever admit to. And this also means that our whole social structure is to some event not even ‘real’ any more- the virtual world of the Internet plays a big role in shaping relationships with people and staying up to date with the lives of close ones. As a side note, these days social identity is as much about how we project ourselves online as how we act in social situations, and gives us all scope to judge and be judged. 

+ When life seems to be mucking up at every choice you make, the one enduring thing you can truly rely on is your sense of self. All we really have is our own moods and whims to guide us through life and everything else is transient and unreliable.

I am both excited and apprehensive as to what could happen in the next twelve months, but am willing to give it a shot and make each experience my own

The most life-changing events in our lives are not really down to us. I read a quote the other day from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, which beautifully elaborates on the seemingly serendipitous nature of life:

“Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”–David Foster Wallace

I’m of the opinion that achieving success in life is entirely down to you, in so much as that you can influence events and the course of your life more than many people think. When you crumble at the hand life might have dealt you, ask yourself, “what choices did you make that led you here?” Sometimes, people are completely blind to their role as an agent of the very thing most important to them; their own life!

I’m not suggesting that everyone in the world has the power or means to become whoever they want to be. After all, life is about give and take and it’s sadly inevitable that some people’s gain is only possible with the eventuality of another’s loss. Take the job market. It’s very tempting to assume that you DESERVE your cut of what the world has to offer, but to everyone else you’re a stranger who’s no more deserving than the next person. And the same applies to money, relationships, security – almost anything that means anything to people. All that matters is recognising your little place in the world, and accepting that the number of people who care about your fate might not be as big as you think!

I first read the quote below a week or two ago in one my daily emails from Writer’s Almanac. It got me thinking about what’s more important in shaping our lives – our own gut instinct and emotions, or logic and reason? After all, although we can do our best to influence the route of our lives, much of it is down to chance and the actions of others.

“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not.”–D.H. Lawrence

Are we responsible for everything that happens to us, or is it all just the luck of the draw? I can’t stand anything more than people who believe their failings in life is all down to other people. Surely it’s all about responsibility for your own situation in life and making sure that you do everything you can to increase your chances of luck smiling on you!

“That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.”–Garth Stein

“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”–William Jennings Bryan

Life doesn’t come with a step-by-step guide to how to get everything you want or reach where you want to be. At the risk of sounding like a crazed self-help book addict, as long as you avoid blaming others for the low points in your life, and appreciating the role you play in your own happiness, you’re on the right track. If anything, recognising your own powerlessness in your own life can be pretty empowering. You can spend less time agonising over your day-to-day choices and just be, safe in the knowledge that that true empowerment is letting go of the non-existent power you were so sure you yielded over your own life!

Facebook is so much more than a tool for communicating with friends. It’s inevitably also used to project an image of ourselves to best friends, childhood acquaintances, exes and of course the people we’re so want to impress. Online personalities are one-sided, highly edited and, for me, they can be symptomatic of a worrying trend where people get so lost in themselves and their own image that Facebook is merely a tool to create a self-concept they wish to be true.

The same goes for personal blogs where selective photos, galleries of sun-drenched days and the power of Photoshop rule. Take a look at the most visited blogs on Bloglovin and you can see that they’re invariably the ones with endless soft-focus pictures of themselves and a round-up of only the most glamorous places they’ve recently visited. It goes hand in hand with how people choose to maintain their Facebook profiles – I have even seen one person who uploads photos from a fashion blog and then pretends that it’s her…

Facebook should be about interaction and keeping friends and family up to date with your life, not just about posting vacuous facts about yourself and photos of yourself alone in your room!

For most people, social media is a forum to advertise a specific construct of yourself, one that, for the most part, you can control. I’d love to see more people being just as comfortable outlining their fears and (possibly) controversial opinions as they are uploading photos of themselves in a new outfit. I’d love to see more people use Facebook as a tool to share information rather than just as a tool to appease your self-absorbed tendencies.

Self-expression and the power to construct an online personality for ourselves is just one of the many perks of the internet. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be fun, light-hearted and make us feel good! It’s just worrying that people are starting to forget that the sum of who you are is so much more than the photos you upload and what you decide to ‘like’ on Facebook.

I know people who have felt the need to upload intimate photos of their child’s birth, and these days it’s almost odd if someone doesn’t update their status at their own wedding. We get so bogged down with recording our lives that the danger is we forget to properly live them. Travellers search just as avidly for wi-fi as they do adventures and a cold beer! People spend more time uploading photos from their phone than using them to actually phone their friends.

The danger is that Facebook acts like a security blanket, as it’s a scarily easy way of assessing how your life is faring compared to your peers, or at least measuring up to their perceived lifestyle. It looks like more and more people are all set to spend their whole lives frantically refreshing their Facebook news feed, completely missing the real events are going on in the real world!

One of the best (and worst) things about London is that there’s so much out there just waiting to be discovered. However many places you visit in the evenings and at the weekends, it just isn’t possible to fit in everything I would into a week’s 168 hours! I’m trying to visit new places every week, so here’s a round-up of what I’ve found recently:

• Open Air Shakespeare at Victoria Embankment Gardens <-- The acoustics are pretty poor here so make sure you sit near the front to keep up with all the action, but it's a breath of fresh air hidden away in Central London

• The Troudadour, Earl’s Court <-- This is where Bob Dylan played in the 1960s, but is now worth a visit for its timeless interior, beautiful garden and their gorgeous potato wedges (picture below)

• Le Tea Cosy, Primrose Hill <-- This place does the best lemon chiffon cake I've ever tasted!

My friend Mandy has a two-month free trial with Taste Card, and it's given us the chance to try out some places around London we wouldn't normally have known about. The other week we tried out Tod's Grill in Islington, where to start I had calamari followed by a delicious lamb shank. At first we were a bit sceptical because we were the only customers in there, but then pockets of people started to enter the restaurant (eclectically decorated with posters for local events from over the years), thankfully displacing our fears that we had been lured in to an unpopular price just because of a half-price offer!

 
 

Things I Still Need to Do in London

• Ronnie Scott’s, Soho.
• Watch some live music at The Slaghtered Lamb.
• Have a night out at Lost Society, Clapham.
• Watch a play, any play.
• Spark London – Britain’s first true-storytelling club night.
• Visit the British Library
• Visit the Nightjar bar in Shoreditch
• Watch a free lecture at Gresham College

     

I wish I’d discovered The Fabulous Stains as a teenager. The film itself is pretty entertaining considering the fact that it’s low-budget, features inexperienced actors and took over a year to edit with the ending changed several times! It’s 90% angsty, passionate girl power, 5% cringe and 5% “WTF?” in equal measure.

Diane Lane’s portrayal of scornful teenager Corinne “Third Degree” Burns searching for fame to fill the void in her soul is just breathtaking. The haircut, the sullenness, the unabashed stage presence despite wearing a see-through top and skunk hairdo all combine to make memorable cinematic gold. The storyline itself is completely forgettable, but what I love about the film are the visuals and the cutting moments of dialogue that almost seem profound despite their place in a fim that barely anyone has heard of. I love the way her name almost suggests she’s burnt out or is driven by a heated fury, as if all that’s left in the ashes is her pursuit of fame and music (although granted, her band isn’t exactly musical genius). Some of my favourite quotes include:

• Corinne Burns: He was an old man in a young girl’s world.

• Lawnboy: Everybody wanna to go to Heaven, but nobody wanna die.”

• Corinne Burns: “Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday.”

• Lawnboy: “There’s no difference between me and the next man. I is he and he is I, like I is you and you is me.”

And my favourite…
Corinne Burns: “You don’t fool me for a minute I know all about you. You came here tonight thinking you’d see some cute and wonderful rockstar. And you hoped he’d take one look at you from up on that stage and he’d fall in love with you just like that. Then your saviour could take you out of this dump of a town you live in – you could be different from all the other girls … Suckers! Suckers! Suckers! Suckers! Be yourselves. These guys laugh at you. They got such big plans for the world but they don’t include us. So what does that make you? Just another girl lining up to die. [...] I’m perfect! But nobody in this shithole gets me, because I don’t put out!”