I love a day of hard work.
comparing the first week of january 2024 to january 2025
It’s a very odd time to already be in a reflective mood, but here I am! Today, I woke up bright and early in order to get some photos done for an opportunity. My skin is fucked up at the sides and I should probably get a new face wash, but I thought of what MissRFabulous said. “I can’t look good when I’m hustling! I need to look like this to hustle more!” and that soothed me. I left the house with a few sips of orange juice and a determination to have my pictures done by 7am. I had a black coffee with one sugar packet that I stifled down my throat and set down for the pictures. I was instructed to take photos like a moody 90s Calvin Klein Model. My hands were awkwardly tucked into my jean pockets and I tried my best not to poke my acrylics in the tiny space. In some pics, there was an odd golden halo effect around me that we tried to remove but it just didn’t work. I sent the three images I thought were most decent off and then I stayed and did a workout. 3x sets of 10 bulgarian splits (10kg weight used), 3x sets of 20 front lunges, 20 back lunges and 20 squats with 2x 8kg weights used. I tried my best to do a bit of ab work, but a few seconds into bicycle position, my legs gave out and my arms had had enough after doing 3.5 full body pull ups. I did all of this in jeans without planning to, and then I had a dinner with my friend. I ended up staying an hour longer than I thought I would, having a great conversation and have now come back home and had the clothes I had been procrastinating to wash put in the wash. I have also gotten an offer, for the first time, for an acting job. I smiled typing that.
It’s so weird to think about how quickly this year that I’ve let myself get into a creative mode, thinking about the person that I was last year’s January. Snapchat’s throwback feature has come to haunt me and add to the reflective feel my mind had already put me in. The pictures showed me letting my little brother lie on my back to take a picture, the image of the food I got in my bed and pictures of me with my sister in the cinema. Summarised, these images seem simple and don’t really arise any questions. The context for them is a lot more bleak.
An interesting coincidence that I didn’t know about Magdalen College is that my great grandfather (white side) had gone. He had gone to the Cambridge version, though. I had applied for the Oxford University Magdalen. At first, I was set on Christchurch College, but my teacher discouraged me by telling me that a former alumni of my school retaking the year was also applying who had already gotten the A* grades. Despite ending up getting all A*s in my final exams, as predicted, I didn’t have that much faith in myself to take the gamble of applying against someone who had already done the hard part. I settled for Magdalen College as my Oxford Uni college of choice to apply for and I got an interview, which I had thought I had done well in. 834 applications were shortlisted. 17 applications were shortlisted for Magdalen in order to be interviewed by Magdalen College by Magdalen professors, which I was. There were around 14 spaces possible to give. I was not one of them. I had missed my chance by 3 spaces, in my mind. Only three. My lucky number, might I add! News of my rejection in early January plunged me into a depression. I found out during the school day and cried. I came in the next day, thinking I could handle it. Then I got a letter in the mail of my rejection, adding salt to the wound. I didn’t go to school for 1 or 2 days. I ordered Coco di Mama pasta to come to my house and I ate and slept the whole day. I seriously considered quitting the idea of university altogether because of the opportunity I had lost. I didn’t, but it was a serious statement for me to make, with how much I have been outwardly vocal that I love going to school. I could tell you the emotional aspect of these two days I passively experienced, but I don’t see the point. Thinking about it now, the feelings feel like a wave that threatened to knock me over only to settle at the last minute. The experience doesn’t feel like rock bottom, because I don’t think that was all hope lost for me. I believe it was a lucky bullet dodged.
The thing that really strikes me about those days was how much I needed to get up and do something, but I just couldn’t. I am a very active person by nature. When I wake up in the morning, I don’t see the point of waking up to do nothing. I think to myself, might as well sleep and I don’t let myself wake up until there is something to do. I don’t thrive on an open schedule or a free day. My mum would always implore me to relax whenever I had a free day, but I admitted to her that I simply couldn’t. I like knowing that there is a purpose, planned or unplanned, to my day. My sleep is already a pleasure in itself. I dream often and vividly. It doesn’t serve me to be more excited about the fantasies of my mind when the real potential of my day is right there. My love for life and what life has to offer is best represented by the words of Aerosmith: …and I don’t want to miss a thing! Being in this new loop of existence where I was ignoring my regular habits were startling me. I felt a flicker of who I was, active and ready for purpose, but it was lost in layers and layers of self doubt all from an email and a letter. The fact that I was rejected by such a slim chance isn’t the main thing that had me dazed. It was that I felt this strongly for an institution that had nothing to do with the dreams that used to keep me going.
I was pulled out of this slump the moment I decided to think about the things I really wanted to pursue. Yes, the school is amazing. But I thought after, who would I be? Would I have the courage to go after the long buried dream I had of acting that I had planned to unearth? But when would that day come? When would I give it purpose? It was by allowing myself to think of my true purpose that I got out of my hermit state…and now, today, I have experienced a day working towards this purpose of mine and it’s paid off.
But what if it didn’t pay off? What if, today, I had come onto Substack to say that I had done all the same things today: woken up at 4am, left the house by 6am, taken my pictures, did my workout in jeans, had a lunch with my friend, did my washing and no job had been rewarded to me?
If you asked me a few months ago, I’d probably say no. I was very big on results, as a lot of people are. If you’ve worked for how long to make something work, it stings when it doesn’t. It feels like a direct attack on you when it doesn’t. It was actually a friend telling me that she remembered what I told her during her breakup that made me lose my connection between reward and contentment. In the same breath I was shaming myself for not getting results instantly with things, I was commending my friend at her efforts with love, even if she didn’t get the reward of reciprocation. Once this clicked that being content should be linked with being true to the kind of routines or person that you are, I felt myself less angry at results out of my control more and more. I am a hard worker, and I like that I continue to be, whether I get a desirable outcome. I love that this year, I’m experiencing a beginning of the year working hard and getting up, rather than feeling myself rot in bed. I’m reflective because I am a true lover of the present.
-Halle