Do you ever feel like you're living someone else's life?
This seems to happen to me fairly often. At the moment in particular, having just started University, I'm fairly certain I've taken the place of someone more deserving. I look back and question how I got into a top ten University. I left school at 16 with 9 GCSEs and absolutely no intention of going to Uni. I was expelled (well, 'asked to leave') a good school when I was 14 and I had never been more relieved. I think when I was younger I felt the World owed me something. Although I have no idea what that was!
When I'm sitting in a lecture, I often wonder whose place I have taken, and who I should be, even, questioning who I am to be sitting there. I am older than everyone else. Their lives are so complicated in comparison to mine (yes, I know it should be the other way around), but they are just working out what is going on in the world, what emotions they are feeling etc. My brain tells me I should be at home, looking after my children, or at work in my poorly paid job in the NHS. It doesn't seem to compute that I might be entitled to be sitting amongst these clever young people.
Even now, sitting in the library at Uni, I don't think I should be here. Maybe someone will come in and drag me out, saying there has been a mistake. Or maybe I just need to get used to the idea that this IS my life. My new life. A new adventure which I am embarking on.
The flurry of essays and exams last week certainly felt very real!
It will sink in soon. I hope.
Mind you, I come out of most philosophy lectures and seminars questioning whether or not I exist at all! Thanks Descartes.
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Where I rank in the Tots100
