I’m not sure about the etiquette of blogging but I assume that writing a poem to my lover after six months of not writing is something of a blog faux pas; so apologies for that (and more on that another time).

But my topic of today is ‘excess’.

I’ve moved to Scotland to study a masters (which is amazing! Although I’m terrible at getting my work finished before the very last minute – but again, another time) and all of my friends and classmates are considerable younger than me (the average age is around 25), which is fine except that they all want to go out clubbing every single weekend and prior to going out they like to congregate at someone’s house and play drinking games.

The problem for me is that (potentially due to my age) I cannot go out clubbing and study the next day. In fact, I cannot either stay out past 1am or drink too much and work the next day. Which probably makes me seem very ‘square’, which got me thinking about my past, and the irony of my years of excess which have somehow been erased from my current persona.

When I was eleven we moved from a very nice part of Sydney, where the children were all well behaved, to a fairly rough part of Melbourne. My last year of primary school was memorable for the political over-throw we achieved when we ousted the bitchy, popular girl. Prior to the change she liked to mime that she had the guys wrapped around her little finger and nicknamed the various groups in our school as KKs (kool kids), MMs (middle miners; us) and SSs (super sluts, more aptly labelled nerds).

By the time I was 15 we were spending our weekends at my best friend’s house because her mum, who was recently divorced, didn’t care what we did. What we did essentially amounted to going to parties or the park and drinking until we threw up. One time my sister and I shotted an entire bottle of bourbon (a friend’s birthday present) between us, just to prove we could.

By the age of 19 I was using heroine on a weekly basis, smoking ‘brekkie bongs’ and using meth on a not irregular basis. So I’m not unused to excess!

By 22 I had stopped using hard drugs, although I still drank to excess, smoked weed and took party drugs (or ‘herbals’ for the duration of my time in New Zealand). At 30 I finally had my drinking under sufficient control and was in a supportive enough situation to sign up for six months of horrendous hep C treatment necessary as a result my past digressions.

So my point is I guess that I’ve grown up. I don’t look back on my past and think ‘oh how cool I was’, I look back and feel pity for a little girl from a good family who got transplanted into a harsh environment where she didn’t fit in or belong (but who really belongs there?); who felt it was utterly necessary to ‘keep up with the boys’ – both in order to fit in and to prove that girls are as good as boys. I like hanging out with younger people, even when they think I’m soft for having overcome being several orders of magnitude harder than they will ever be.

I also think my past is important because it demonstrates that no one is truly at such a low that they can’t drag themselves out of their past. That is my past and I am intelligent, beautiful and successful. I’ve become confident with age and now that I don’t have anything to prove the pressure for excess is less acute.

Life is a journey, as long as you are learning don’t be too hard on yourself.