It's been a weird week for me.
After finally making the huge decision to drop out of Uni, I've found myself with a resounding and profound sense of:
Shit, well what now?
But I think I knew the moment it turned 2015. I knew long before the thought crossed my mind to leave. I think I've always known what to do next, because it's running through my blood.
I create.
It's a feeling that's quite bizarre, but I feel like once I made that bold statement and took that monumental risk, I opened up my heart and my mind to the deities of creativity and said I'm ready.
And I have never melt more inspired, driven and creatively passionate ever - it's positively brimming out of my bones and streaming down my limbs.
This past week, my first real week without the burden of University looming over my shoulders, I've been in the recording studio twice with my band boys, laying down the tracks for our debut EP, been hungrily tearing through books, magazines, newspapers and absorbing every last word, I've been filling up notebooks with writing, listening to music for hours on end and I've even discovered a pretty lame infatuation with crosswords.
But that's the thing I've realised. Now is my golden moment, the time to really grow, educate myself, hone my skills and discover new ones to truly curate the best existence I can out of the puzzle pieces I was put on this earth with.
I have been given my life back, and now is the time to create an extraordinary existence.
One thing which has really surprised me, which I'm over the moon about, is art.
I've never been a traditionally arty person and it's always bothered me, because my synesthesia creates the most mind-bending and extraordinary images and visual emotions in my brain, and night after night my dreams are so damn vivid, that I often struggle to string together a set of words to truly convey the things I see.
But still riding the soaring high from breaking free from the creative suffocation of academia, and still feeling the tingles of this fresh new year and all the promise it has, I decided it was going to be my mission to get better at art, headed over to an art store in town and went on a spree.
My first attempt was pretty awful - still resembling a human being, but nothing greater than your standard year 9 Thursday afternoon art class.
But I felt this pull toward it to keep going.
I woke up and all I wanted to do was draw.
I got home after work and all I wanted to do was paint.
Dare I say it, this has perhaps even overtaken my desire and need to write, it's been so strong.
And for reasons which only further convince me that I've inadvertently tapped into some secret part of the universe, after never having a single art class or tutorial... Without any reason, I'm actually kinda fucking not bad.
It doesn't really make any sense to me but I'm incredibly excited.
And this discovery seems to have solidified a new part of my plan.
A lot of people feel so morbidly curious as to know what I'm going to do with my life now I'm a drop out, and I delight in telling them I've figured it out. What I say is often met with a whimsical smile of ah cool... good luck with that, but I know in my heart if I want this enough, I'll make it happen.
I do currently have a job, plus any small revenue I gain from online projects, so from now until June, I have two trips planned and booked.
At the end of February, I'm going to Lanzarote, a small volcanic island off the coast of Africa with my family. At the end of March, I'm going to Iceland with my best friend to climb up into the glaciers and watch the universe align among the Northern Lights for the March 20th full solar eclipse.
Then from June until August, that's when the real deal happens.
For three months I will be roadtripping across the whole of the USA with my American boy, Noah. From Virgina on the East Coast where we'll be chilling with my band boys as they work at a country club, to the beautiful mountains of Colorado where Noah gets to return to his home, we'll be driving right the way across the great plains of America to California where I'll be meeting up with my friend from LA who's protesting to save an old 1940's movie theater from being bulldozed to build a Starbucks.
And all the while we'll be travelling, I'm going to be writing non-stop and finishing my book, whilst getting lost in the wilderness with my watercolours and sketchpad and painting until I pass out.
It's the trip of a lifetime, and I simply refuse not to make it happen.
And although the details of this plan are a little sketchy, I have the perfect idea to help raise the funds to allow me to make my dream come true. Closer to the time, I'm going to start a kickstarter campaign. Every single person who donates, say a standard fee of £10 or something, will receive a care package of passion in the post.
In this package will be a personalised letter, some trinkets from the state we are in when the letter was written, a hand-painted picture of the landscape of where we are at the time with a polaroid of the painting process, and anything else I might spy to add a little touch of magic to the parcel.
And in the meantime, I will be creating bespoke portraits and artwork to sell on etsyto raise some funds before the trip.
I'm not some hotshot hooked up blogger who can use their connections to get anything they want in life, I'll never be that and I never want to. In fact, I'm broke as balls but I've never been happier, and I had a glorious realisation the other day that wealth and materialism is never something I aspire to. I'd be quite happy working a shitty job for the money and flexibility to travel often and to write forever.
I'm simply a passionate young girl with dreams exploding from her eyeballs and the burning to desire to inhale positivity and exhale creativity and beauty into a world that can be so dark at times.
So I'm not going to idly sit by and watch my dreams escape me because it's too 'unfeasible' or I 'can't really afford it right now'. 2015 is about throwing caution to the wind and finding a way to make it work.
So that's my plan.
And hell, even if the unfortunate happens and this doesn't work out, I can always look back fondly on the time I dropped out of Uni to become a penniless painter selling the artwork of her soul to afford to flee to America with her lover to finish her novel on the dusty highways of USA.
How motherfucking poetic.
Keep up with my creations over on my instagram or let me know if you want me to paint you - for now, I need all the practice I can get.
Live wild or why live?
