Received my final grades recently and I got what I expected but came within 0.9% of getting the highest band through some incredible happenstance of fortune and equally, misfortune. Yet for some reason I don't feel bad, not at all. I'm free now, all that's left to do is graduate and then the entirety of university is behind me.

As soon as we got our results, I started getting notifications on my phone from LinkedIn of people in my course posting about their results in the grating "Let's link and build!" corporate speech and I couldn't help but laugh. Man I haaaate LinkedIn like you wouldn't believe, the idea that my fiscal fate, my financial opportunities are held hostage by the premier neoliberal, venture capitalist social media application is crazy to me, surely theres got to be a better way, surely...

I've been playing Rimworld ever since the new DLC update came out and I've been inspired to create a page for it on my website, but I've been procrastinating way too much. The page is steadily coming along, but the game is just too addicting, and life just keeps marching on.

A friend got back together with his ex for the third time despite a whole spiel about how they'd never get back together again and all I could do in response to the news was hit the crying emoji, you know the one. In return he hit the crying emoji back, but 10 times over.

I don't consider myself a judgemental person, live and let live (as long as you're not hateful), we're young, mistakes are meant to be made I thought, but then a realisation started to creep up on me.

I feel like I'm so obsessed with trying to be a better person that I haven't really lived life as myself. I think too much about what I could be while what I am passes on by, only to retroactively wish I was myself more at a time long gone.

People my age make mistakes. My mistake is that I don't make enough mistakes, that I'm too afraid for things to go wrong and then have the audacity to wonder why nothing happens.

A great fear I hold is that soon I'll be in my mid 20s and I'll be the same as I am now, and that nothing about me has changed. I'd like to say that from when I started university I have changed a lot, but I don't know, is it a real change if nothing real has changed?

That being said, I'm not really sure what change really is, even when it comes out of my own mouth.

I think I reserve all the judgement I have for others and point it only towards myself. I'd like to say I should stop, but I feel like the scrutiny is what keeps me from stagnation, yet one day the eye of judgement I cast upon myself may prove to be too much and I will crumble under its gaze.

Or maybe things will be alright, I don't know, these things will sort themselves out probably, hopefully.

Anyways, this week will be the week I start job seeking, I say this week because yesterday I said tomorrow, but now its nearly the end of today so hopefully I do actually start looking for work at some point this week.

I tried making plans to hang out with some friends later this week but one of them's working, and then no one wants to hang. So it starts. Is this adulthood?

Received my final year marks and my degree qualification today.

I woke up at 10:30 AM with 5 different alarms set 5 minutes apart from each other. It was the 3rd one which finally woke me from my pitiful sleep, and in an instant I checked my phone only to be bombarded with messages in the group chat of everybody talking about their results.

In a rush I quickly got up to try and see what my own were only to be stopped by the horrible UX of my school website but after some time I finally found it and there it was, the culmination of three years of my life and thousands of pounds in debt.

Secretly in my mind I had hoped I had gotten higher, I had told myself I settled for what I got but a few months of giving up won't completely change the mind of a once academic overachiever.

I had given up on my dissertation being any good, but somehow it turns out I got an A. Huh. For some reason, my university hadn't given out our overall grade so I had to calculate it all on my own, finding results from previous years in old emails and lo and behold, I was a single percent under the highest band, and within the borderline policy but didn't reach the requirement to bump my qualification. Seeing that honestly, I felt free.

Despite missing by a narrow margin I felt relieved from the burden of academic expectation, an end to it all, perhaps not yet the end of my academic journey, but the end of a self 10 years in the making, someone who lived for grades yet always came short, I was haunted by my marks but now I let it all go.

I went out today and I came home with less regrets about my interactions with other people. I still fumbled my way through conversations and smatterings of awkward silence still prevailed, but I walked home with less self critique running through my brain.

I talked to more than one person, I had a continuous conversation that lasted longer than a minute, I still don't know how to make my own personality shine through the veneer of small talk, but I suppose with more practice, eventually things will get better.

What I hope from this is one day I'll look back and be proud of how far I've come. For a long time I used to be in denial about the reality surrounding my social skills. When I'm with my friends, I have no problems being social, and when I'm alone, its not that I'm bad at speaking, its actually just that I don't want to!

It can be daunting trying to talk to people after being pretend nonchalant for years of my life, but I'm taking back years of my life that I lost and squandered. I want to be authentic and earnest to my self and to others in a world poisoned by link-and-build networking speech and LinkedIn brain rot.

It is funny that every single conversation I had today people asked me what I wanted to do after I graduate and I just kept having to say I've got no damn idea.

Life's been chill, actually not really, my mind is worse than the reality around me. but things could be worse, as in, things could actually be bad as opposed to me just feeling bad.

I went to a concert recently, I guess my first one with general admission, and much to my surprise, the music does not start when doors open. Nothing's more humiliating than circling the weather app and scrolling through already read group chats while in the corner trying to look occupied.

I can't help but feel a tinge of embarrassment, like I'm late to life. Things I should've been doing my first year of university, I'm only doing now at the very end, and I'm far behind everyone else.

I spent all day thinking about the concert that I was going to later that evening, I both wanted to talk to people but at the same time, I felt dread loom over me at the prospect of having to engage that part of my brain for so long. By the time I got there I decided not to think about it. Just listen to the music when it starts and have fun, the more I worry about these things the less fun I have. Why am I living life if not to have fun?

Once the music started, I forgot all of my worries, having fun, smiling, I realised midway how much I regulate my facial expressions, it feels almost wrong to smile around so many people, yet I can't not smile, I'm happy.

I feel reinvigorated with life once more, there is light in my path even if all my vision is clouded in darkness. I believe because I have to. I must believe, I must.

I went out recently to go to a local movie screening and every time I go out, most times I always end up meeting only a single person, having a small but searching conversation and then never talking to anyone else, but simultaneously only engaging in half a conversation with the person who I've targeted while I think up of things to say but never actually end up saying them.

What's worse is I feel sated because I've talked to someone, but also I feel unfulfilled because I didn't talk to more people or cement any real connection with my fellow human.

I have a passable enough social skills to get by, but I lack the charisma or the gumption to try to make an earnest try to befriend someone. I've come to the realisation that in attempting to make myself more sociable, I neuter my own personality, rounding the edges that form my being. As my brain scrolls through the flashcard of small-talk prompts, I forget that I myself, am myself.

I hate that I constantly have to go through this in my mind.

I think having a week break from going outside stagnated me. I have to remind myself its a process, slow down.

Slow down.

On my way home, a black stray cat nuzzled against my leg and in the dark of the night, under the soft amber hue of the lamppost above, I stood there softly petting it for only a few seconds before it ran off into the bushes, retreating into the foliage by the brick wall.

When I entered the house, everyone was already asleep. I took a shower and brushed my teeth, only to not fall asleep until 3 am.

The Sun's unrelenting glare seeps into the brick walls of these terraced houses. A slow death, oven baked. Again and again, I am melting.

When I'm not playing Death Stranding, I'm cooped up, an inch away from my fan, blasting on the highest setting.

Death Stranding has really taken over my life, something about building roads and ziplines just speaks to me so much so that perhaps 60% of my waking day has been spent playing this game, though the heat is causing fatigue to set in and now most of my day is spent trying (and failing) to cool down.

Last week was a nothing week, this week however, a movie screening for a Vietnamese movie, and maybe I go outside to the park too, we'll see. Next week, a concert for a jazz band, then a few days after that, my final results for my last exams and my dissertation come out. Two weeks after that comes my formal graduation ceremony, then a friends birthday party some days after that.

Once that's done, I suppose I will be 'free'. Free from the burden in my mind, the uncertainty of grades, results, free from the academic institution. Free from it all. Only to find myself trapped in a new burden. That of true uncertainty, the uncertainty of my future.

I chose biology because I was good at it. It was the easy option and I didn't know what else to do. I liked Biology, but I didn't love it. Nonetheless, I put myself in debt and embarked on a three year degree anyways.

There was a time in my first year where I accepted my possible future of being a career biologist, doing something in conservation or something akin to those lines. If I'm going to settle, I want to settle while doing something good for this world. By second year, my motivation had waned, but I had accepted that even if I didn't love it, I might enjoy it.

In the Summer break between second and third year, I found myself yearning for a 'true happiness', one that is sustained and real, not transient pleasures, but a love, a dream. Chasing after grades instead of learning, something was deeply wrong with how my life in university was progressing, but I figured it was just exam fatigue. It was, but it never got better.

It wasn't until my mother collapsed that things were put into perspective, and I could no longer bear it. Reading my journal entries from that period in my life, only a year and some months ago, the day before my mother collapsed, I went to drink with some friends before one of them left to Australia for a year. I haven't spoken to him since January. Maybe I'll message him when he comes back, he's a nice person, talented singer too.

I thought, in earnest, perhaps I should dropout. Yet, I was so close to the end, why don't I wade it through. But at the same time, I don't know if I could handle it anymore. I toughed it out evidently, but perhaps I'd be happier if I didn't, if I just took the leap.

Funnily enough, I don't think it was university that did it to me. It was doing something I wasn't passionate about, doing something for necessity, not for love. It's why even though despite my incessant whining about university, I am considering applying for that masters degree in social and cultural anthropology (on condition that I get the grades I need and that the university accepts me). If I want better job prospects, this gets me no further or perhaps even worse off. If I want to learn and study something I truly love, this is what I should pursue.

I don't know what I want to do, all I do know is that I am taking at least a year away from any careers or degrees, for once I want to live as I am. No obligations.

I live a very vague life because I know not yet who exactly I am, it feels like everybody knows what they want to do with their life except me. I wish I had a brain that could accept what its given, in my pursuit of happiness I seem to only make myself sad.

I suppose I only think like this because I believe I have something in me, a potential worth dreaming for. Maybe in 5 years I will have understood what that is, or maybe I will have settled and found happiness in doing the mundane. Or maybe I'll be dead.

This post was really only supposed to be about Death Stranding and how hot it is but it somehow derailed into this.