love and marriage.

Relationships consist of compromises and negotiations. Some of these are harmless and require only a small amount of thought – you want Chinese for dinner but he’s in the mood for seafood. Solution: order take out from two different restaurants. Some, however, require a little more attention. For example, you want to get married, he doesn’t. Or vice versa. If all you’ve dreamed about since you started dating was finding the perfect partner and having the perfect wedding, it can be hard to imagine something else. So what happens if you do find the perfect partner, someone who ticks all the boxes, but they don’t believe in marriage? Do you stay with them, happy that you found someone you love or do you leave to find someone who wants what you want? To me, the sensible answer seems to be stay. If they’ve agreed to be committed to you long term and are simply against the idea of marriage, does it really change your relationship? Does it change the fact that you found someone you want to spend the rest of your life with? You don’t need a marriage certificate to be able to do that. But then, at the same time, I understand wanting to find someone who wants what you want, who wants to marry you, who wants to offically declare their committment to you and you alone. And if a wedding is what you want and what will make you happy, shouldn’t the other person be willing compromise and give you that? Why do you have to be the one to give up your dream for them? And would a small part of you wonder if it really was that they don’t ever want to get married, or that they don’t want to marry you? I imagine that would creep into your thoughts, and be pretty hard to escape once it was there. Love and marriage are not the same thing, but would you give one up for the other?

what i want to be when i grow up.

I was invited to a themed 21^st not too long ago. The theme was ‘what I want to be when I grow up’, about what we wanted to do when we were younger. For me, it’s still the same thing. I’ve always wanted to write. Since I was old enough to know how to do it, I’ve always enjoyed writing. I used to love coming in to class on Monday morning when I was in year one and writing about my weekend. When I was nine I had to write stories that we built on each week. One of mine was about talking animals. The other was about a couple who got kidnapped and tortured. Pretty heavy stuff for a nine year old, I know, but it was around the time the movie The Bone Collector came out and that’s what I was basing it on. I remember this clearly. I also remember that my teacher wrote comments like “you have an excellent writing style”. I remember this because I felt so proud and it was one of those moments where I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I actually am good at this. Maybe I can do this’. I still have those stories, too. So, in year 5 I wanted to be a novelist. Of course, after attempting this in my spare time I realized it was a lot easier to write something that was only a couple of pages long than to write something that was 400 pages. My book may still come, if I’m ever able to successfully write it, but that won’t be for years.

Then I think it was year 7 that I started writing songs. This continued into high school and at one point I fantasized about becoming a song writer. By this stage I was smart enough to know that cracking into the music business would be a rather mean feat and it might be better to come up with a more realistic career choice. Hence, I studied journalism. My point is, I have always wanted to write. It wasn’t something I decided on in year 12 because we had to chose something to study after high school. It’s always been what I’ve done. Hell, half my life is saved on my computer because I write about everything. I used to change my myspace page every few days just so I could write something new. Writing has always been what I’ve wanted. And if I couldn’t do it, that’s not just 3 years at Uni I’m unable to do anything with, that’s my whole life. What would happen then?

cry ugly.

Crying is my default reaction. I cry when I’m sad, annoyed, angry, anxious, nervous, stressed, confused. Some people yell, others clam up. I cry. It’s just the way it is. I’m not sure how weird this is (because this is the kind of thing you’d generally only tell a bestfriend and even then you’d risk sounding completely idiotic and possibly unstable) but sometimes I even cry for no good reason. I can’t fully explain it. Sometimes it’s for one of those silly reasons like I’ve had a bad day. You know those days where little things pile up and by the end of it you just need to break down. Sometimes it’s because I am worried or nervous. Sometimes it’s because I’m nostalgic. But I’m not talking a few tears thinking about someone I miss. I’m talking truly intense crying until I’m gasping for air, clutching at my pillow with all the strength I can summon and feeling my head pounding with what I can only assume is a headache. It’s at this point that I forget whatever inconsequential notion set me off to begin with and I am unable to think about anything, yet still unable to stop crying. Sure, sometimes I will try to rationalize my behaviour but I know nothing is that upsetting in my life to cause this kind of over the top reaction. So instead I just go with it. Sometimes I even think back to particularly upsetting moments in my life, just to spur it on. Get it all out, as they say. Because sometimes there isn’t anything better than a good cry. Sometimes it makes you realize how silly you’re being, even if it leaves you with mascara staining your pillow. Of course, I only cry like this in the privacy of my own bedroom. No one wants to see me like that. My mum once told me I ‘cry ugly’. And she was right. I don’t look cute and endearing when I cry. My face goes bright red, my eyes sting, I look disgusting. Even I don’t want to look at myself when I cry. But it’s still always my default reaction for dealing with things. And I still always feel better afterwards.

cosmopolitan.

I recently submitted some work to win a competition held by Cosmo called the Cosmo U Ambassador competition. Basically the prize is a 6 month internship with the magazine where you will have an article published in each edition while you intern. There’s also some cash and other things that go with it – but that’s just a side note, not the part I’m most interested in. An internship; experience in the magazine industry and being able to write for the “biggest selling magazine in the world”. That is my dream. All I want to do with my life is write for a magazine, a women’s magazine, and let’s face it – Cosmo is where you want to aim to be.

Of course, something that can’t help but play on my mind (aside from wondering whether my submission is good enough to catch the eye of those judging the applicants) is that the Cosmo office is in Sydney and I am in Perth. For me, this is absolutely a non issue. I would gladly move to Sydney for this opportunity. It may only be a 6 month internship, but it opens doors to endless opportunities and there isn’t much I wouldn’t give for it. The thing that’s playing on my mind is whether Cosmo is taking people’s location into consideration. Obviously it would be easier if the winner was someone who already lived in Sydney. Or even the Eastern States. Let’s face it, within Australia you don’t get much from further from Sydney than Perth.

But this competition is a little too good to be true to let those thoughts creep into my mind. Instead I’m just going to be excited. Even if nothing comes of it, even if I don’t make the selection, I have been so excited during the whole process of entering; exploring ideas and writing a snippet of something I love writing about, in a style I love, for a publication I’d love to work for. There couldn’t be anything better. Even that motivation I couldn’t find is starting to make itself more visible.