Changes

Sorry for my week-long absence... It was probably longer but, all the same, I apologise. 

I spent this last week at Soul Survivor (Week B) in Somerset with about fifteen kids from my church. It was a good week, and much better than I thought it would be. I even found myself enjoying my first time camping! I was prepared to hate my time there with intense passion and I think, up to a point on about the second or third day, I was still certain that that would happen. Yet I found myself so engrossed in it all. Recently, I had been feeling disillusioned by Christianity and my own faith. If I'm honest, I was about ready to call myself out on it and stop labelling myself Christian. And I still have many of these same issues with religion (not just Christianity - all organised religion), but this week I silently dedicated myself to Christ once again and I feel so good about it. I feel a shift in my outlook on life, as if I will finally be able to do the things I have wanted to for so long. Yes, I do fear the struggle of faith in these modern times but I sense that I really am not alone, and feeling the Spirit basically every day this week made me remember this. It was wonderful to spend this time in such a spiritual place and I am so looking forward to next year's event.

But what I really want to write about is how I spent my free time this week. I spent a lot of time with boys this week, which reminded me how much I missed having good male friends. This is a major downfall of going to a girls' school. You lose the ability to make good guy friends, and those are my favourite type of friends! For me, a girl who has always identified as rather boyish, being trapped in a girls' school for five years and only knowing the sort of boys that are absolute twats made me feel as if I would lose that forever. You know, in primary school, I was basically only friends with boys. I played kiss chase on the boys' team, I played football with them, I created Captain Underpants sequels with my best boy friend... I even challenged them to burp the alphabet. Having male friends has always been so natural and so comfortable for me and I had been fed up of female friends and their constant bickering and desire to talk about how attractive or "slutty" others are. So this week, in which I spent the majority of my time with some awkward sixteen-year-olds and the rest with some immature thirteen-year-olds, made me feel so relaxed. For the first time in so long, I had no need to play up my adult, mature side. I danced terribly whenever I wanted, I laughed at their shamefully bad innuendo, I had used underwear thrown in my face (then threw it at others), I partook in extreme Nerf gun battles, I injured people (and myself), I played pranks... I felt like me again. It felt right.

I spent most of my time with a group of three boys, two sixteen-year-olds and a fifteen-year-old. One of those, I felt closer to than the others. It had been in my mind to make friends with him for an awfully long time, verging on a year, but this week I finally decided to make it happen. On the second day, I tagged along with him and his friends and this pattern of being ditched by my friends and having to go around with them carried on for most of the rest of the week. By the third day, he called me his friend (a requirement for me because I prefer not to assume friendship before it is confirmed), by the fourth, I was hanging out in his tent at midnight (against the rules according to the fifteen-year-old who I made incredibly uncomfortable) and by the fifth, he was laying in my lap and being asked if I was his girlfriend by an eight-year-old. In all honesty, I cannot say that that is not what I want. I do. I have been interested in him for a while. But I feel that at this point, I just want to be friends. Yet I am worried. Often, on these sorts of trips, you bond with a group and suddenly, when you get back it seems as if it never happened. You go on with life as if that week of it never occurred, as if you never shared some great moments, as if you never made any memories. This time, I refuse to let that happen. I refuse to neglect a relationship with one of the few people I have found that I am similar to. I refuse to damage a tie with someone who I already miss. I refuse to lose a friendship so good that a twenty-five-year-old said of it after less than a week, "That's love". I cannot let this connection be severed.

(But I probably will because that is what I do, after all. I am horrifyingly bad at maintaining relationships...) I am not about to sit around and wait for myself to ruin this though. I have to do something about this. I have to make some changes. And this will be my most important one...