“Oh well, in 10 years time, we’ll be walking around a zoo”,…to paraphrase a great song by Noah & The Whale. Yesterday was a momentous occasion, and I want to discuss it today. Welcome to Monday. Let's have a bit of a reflective moan.

A while back, I decided to do some digging when I realised that this year was the tenth anniversary of my acceptance into university. I found out the date when the offers were released and the day the next phase of my life began.

It was a Monday. That much, I know. The exam results were released the previous Wednesday, as was (and maybe still is?) the tradition at the time. On that Wednesday, I got my results and was pretty underwhelmed. Not because I didn’t get good results. The results were acceptable. The problem was that I didn’t know if I would be accepted into my number one choice course. From the little I knew from the criteria, I didn’t know since I didn’t meet the mark on whether or not I would get a place in my course. Spoiler alert: I did. Since I was at a loose end, the day the offers came out wasn’t very interesting.

However, it was still necessary for my dad. He was still working at the time and was due to go on a business trip that morning. I wasn’t the early bird my friends and family have come to love today (although my parents still have difficulty gripping it). The offers came in early in the morning. My Dad took the liberty of signing in and seeing what offers had arrived. To everyone’s surprise, my number one choice, DCU, came knocking.

My Dad went into a sleeping 18-year-old Fin and told me the good news. “Fin!” he whispered loudly, “you got DCU!” I woke up from my slumber after hearing the news and then uttered my first words that morning: “fuck off…!”

Now came the fun part: finding accommodation. We didn’t put my name down anywhere because my academic life was not as straightforward as it could have been. I always did okay in school. I knew that the sciences weren’t for me. I knew that I was not the sporty type. However, I have always been interested in creativity and literature (even if I didn’t read as many books as I should have). I liked history too but not enough to study it any further after school. I went on to study Communications. I finally got to live in a big city and had the opportunity to surround myself with likeminded people from all around the country.

Finally, my life began the ten-year-since journey that is now on. A lot has happened in that time. I went on to obtain an MA, which was a one of the most difficult years of my life. I got some grown up jobs for varying lengths of time. I tried to follow various passions with varying degrees of success. We had that thing in 2020. And now, here we are.

You know, initially, this was going to be a bit of a negative-vibe blog today. The reason being that I didn’t think ten years ago that I would be in the position I am now. In a negative way, I mean. I thought I would be living somewhere else with a good paying job and doing creative stuff on the side; if not, the creative stuff being my full-time job. Not to sound too cheesy, but I guess the main thing is that I am still here. I am about to enter the last year of my 20s, and that is both terrifying and motivating. Having now written it; I realise that it doesn’t matter what could have been. I didn’t know that 2020 was going to happen. I didn’t know that its true what they said in that life gets in the way. I can look back now and see that I am doing what I actually want to do more and more each day and that’s reassuring and exciting. Plus, I am learning from mistakes too and good god, are there a lot of them. It turns out nobody knows what they are doing, and nobody is perfect. Sorry to break it to you.

That’s all I wanted to say. I hope it resonated with you in some way. Before I go, it was my good friend Kurt’s birthday yesterday, so happy birthday to him. He means a lot to me. Thank you for reading and thank you for your time.