07:09:2025 Start of September
Time speeding up, comfort and domesticity, new home & old anxiety
14:09:2025 Mid September
Self care and comfort in difficult times, my evolving relationship to God and Christianity, love persevering
21:09:2025 Late September
Life getting busy, feeling antisocial, music as my autumnal intellectual focus
05:10:2025 Start of October
Return to normalcy, autumn in full swing, home and homesickness
07:09:2025 Start of September
This is gonna be a difficult entry to write because I’m writing it on the following Tuesday after an eventful Sunday and a Monday spent processing. I won’t go too far into the details here except to say that what is happening has happened before and I probably should have been expecting it, and I’ll talk about it more next week, maybe.
I wasn’t sure how changed I should expect to feel moving back to my uni town but I certainly feel distinctly different. Time is once again moving very quickly and it’s difficult to keep up - I feel like so much has happened when in reality not much has happened at all. For the most part classical music swallowed me entirely, perhaps except for my faith, which I’ve been refinding separate of the church, and my ex, who briefly appeared on Wednesday (via Whatsapp) and Thursday (during a drunken walk home) and has since disappeared back into blissful irrelevance. I expect I’ll be talking more about them next week as we’ll be meeting to chat but it’s difficult to take myself back into the past - life has moved so far away from them in the past few months, as it always does.
In spite of my anxiety, which has been returning in full force as per September, I’ve been feeling a real sense of comfort and home and enjoying retreating into solitude this past week. Everything feels very cosy and comfortable and easy somehow, or at least that feels like the natural state of things. I’ve been spending a lot of time just enjoying the quiet, especially in the mornings, when I’m almost always alone. I've carried on reading and found I'm not spending so much time online. It doesn't really feel like there's anything there for me. But being around town is also weird since there's not really any students around at the moment, so my space right now is home, my room, my kitchen, my friends' houses. Revelling in how different everything is and I am, and also that I am more myself than ever, which is kind of how I've been feeling for the past few months. Sometimes I've felt like a completely different person to my younger self, but now I feel like every age of young me, all grown up, or at least a little bit grown up.
I wrote in my notes that “September is all about having a warm home to come back to”. I don’t think I really need to paraphrase that.
That said, my physical anxiety symptoms have been at their maximum. The shaking is bad. I had thought it wouldn’t be that bad this year, and admittedly the past few days it’s been fine, but it can be really intense, I wasn’t overreacting about that. I’ve completely lost my appetite which is really unhelpful and very par for the course. On Thursday night I went out and got hammered and consequently more than paid the price with a night of a thundering heartbeat and very little sleep. I’ve since resolved to drink less, which I’ll manage this week and probably not any longer than that. It’s a habit from last year I wouldn’t miss, but I don’t think I’m escaping it that easily.
I’ve been listening to a lot of September music which I’ve found really grounding. It’s a lot more specific than my playlists for the summer, which basically just consist of a whole load of albums over 3 months, whereas September has specific songs I associate with it and listening to them has been really helping me not feel so adrift as everything changes so quickly. It’s so weird to think about how far we are through September already when term hasn’t even started. When it does everything will be going even faster, I suppose. Well, that’s September.
14:09:2025 Mid September
God the past week has been a lot. It's been fast and emotional and eventful and yet nothing has really happened, it's just felt like a lot. Autumn has crashed into my summer peace, and with it gale force winds, torrential rain, a new favourite symphony, a slight religous crisis, reconciliation, anger, my friends and my consequent need for isolation. I feel entirely knocked over with the force of it all, and yet I'm on my feet. A lot of what has happened feels wholly unexpected, and yet looking back now I feel as though I could have seen everything coming. Regardless, so it goes.
God always comes back in September. Feeling forsaken isn't unusual for me during summer - usually God feels more abstract, more difficult to grasp hold of, and instead I catch glimpses of his shadow visiting churches and idling in the countryside. Religion is still a fairly new presence in my life, but there have been a couple of Septembers now where I've felt the necessity of clinging onto God in a changing world that feels hostile or unknowable. This year, evidently, it is more complicated - in my first week back, religion felt like an area I wanted to spend time with, to explore and engage in ways I hadn't previously; then my church let me down.
Organised religion is still kind of unchartered territory for me, an experiment and an adventure into trust and tradition, but returning to secularism this week has proven incredibly comforting. There's a nature reserve in a nearby town I've had a religious experience in before, and on Monday I went there to pray. If it were summer still, I think the peace and comfort I found by the river there would be carrying me through this. It was certainly lovely to be reminded of what I rediscover every year: that regardless of what is going on in your life, and often at this time of year there are challenges that render it necessary, essential to survival, September is always inherently a place of refuge. The church may not be somewhere I feel comfortable at the moment, but I can still always find God in September, in the pale warmth of the sun, the golden light shining through the leaves, the birdsong. Nothing is truly lost.
And yet I'm finding I can't leave. September demands we confront our problems; the comfort and devotion I've found in Christianity, and in this particular church, demand more of my attention. I can't simply turn away and let time heal my wounds like I could in June. Autumn ties me to civilisation, even when it's upsetting.
It's not only society that's been disappointing me, to be honest. That I've gone so long without mental health problems is nothing short of miraculous, and what I've been experiencing this past week has truly not been that intense at all (or maybe I've just handled it well?) but I've not enjoyed watching myself slipping back into old feelings and self destructive urges. I know a part of that is in response to my religous problems - faith and religion I've found are some of the best long term help for my mental health problems, so feeling let down is kind of making me want to relapse as a form of rebellion. And yet September demands self care of me - I find warmth and rest in sleep and comfort in the streaming of autumn into my life, and I can't make myself ignorant of the beauty of the world in a way that will allow me to truly implode. Instead I've been setting limits, taking my problems seriously, going to sleep early, I cannot stress how much going to sleep early has been helping me. The regular schedule of day to day life is keeping me sane, and the start of term promises more structure to hold onto, which I am very much hopeful for. Even my total overwhelm from spending too much time with my friends has not been able to stop me wanting to see them. I'm glad to see that despite all this I still have the impulse to love myself and others. I think that's an integral part of September to me - that regardless of what the world throws at you, you still manage to love yourself. We're gonna stay in love somehow, as Gerard Way says. I should listen to Baby You're a Haunted House more. It's such a good song.
Speaking of music, I've acquired a new favourite symphony: Sibelius 5. I wanted to get into Sibelius this autumn - I don't really know much of his work but it's exactly my kind of thing, and it feels a little cold and wild to me, like the deep dark storms of autumn. Initially nothing was clicking with me, and then I listened to 5, and I love it.
What else. To call meeting with my ex nonevent of the week feels harsh, but it may somehow have been the highlight. In all of my current chaos, to have an honest, open conversation with someone who knows and understands me so well was really lovely. Regardless of how over it I had previously felt, it is really nice to now have it feel fully resolved, to have that weight off of my chest, and to have that period of my life reunderstood through their apology. It felt like we became golden in that conversation, with God shining through us, through our reconciliation. To be able to forgive and offer comfort and relief, what a blessing that is. I really hope they can forgive themselves. I hope September's self love reaches them. I'd really like it to.
I spent a lovely afternoon blackberry picking with my friends after that conversation and it made me think again about it as a seasonal ritual and why I love it so much. I'm not the fondest of blackberries, to be honest, but I find it so meditative to be outside and interacting with nature so closely. It made me want to start gardening, which I've done a little at home over the years. To introduce friends to it was lovely, and it does feel like a fundamentally social, community activity, something you do with your family, with people you love. Spending so much time with my friends again has been lovely - but it's been a lot. In my notes I wrote that "this is prototypical autumn you have to be thrust from summer social isolation into Having Friends with such aggressive force that you have a whole crisis about it and violently need to be alone" and truly I cannot put it any better than that. I feel so emotionally unprepared for the kind of closeness I've been receiving, and the past few days I've had to actively take myself out of social situations for the sake of regaining my sanity in solitude. Having spent a lot of the summer wishing to be with my friends, it feels, as it always does, slightly ungrateful to not be spending as much time with them as I possibly can, but I spent so much of summer alone that I am really needing that solitude at the moment, and I expect, as I usually do through autumn, that this will continue through the season. It has been really nice to have time to myself. I think part of my feeling lost and overwhelmed and like time was moving too quickly was because I wasn't spending enough time with myself - now that I've been prioritising it, I'm starting to feel better.
And so this September continues to show its colours. It's been reminding me a lot of 2022 this year - that was a time when I was deeply unhappy with my education, but after my day was over, I would come home and actively choose to carve out a space of peace and comfort and faith for myself at home. While I keep changing my mind about what that peace and comfort and faith should look like in regards to religion, I've been doing that a lot this week: recognising when I'm in need of comfort and rest and carving out that time, trying to work out what I need, trying to work out how I can slow down, which rituals and structures I can rely on. Time has been moving quickly and abruptly and at times I've felt like I'm being left behind. I'm sure my last entry for September will be a chaotic mess, a million new things happening all at once, and this coming week I will be bracing myself for all I'm worth. I'm sure I'll make it through.
21:09:2025 Late September
I don’t know why I’m surprised that this entry is coming late considering Everything but I really thought I would get it done on Sunday. Unfortunately life has started coming at me at 100 miles and hour and I am barely keeping up as it is. But I’m here now, so I can tell you about the week that’s just been, which has, surprisingly, been pretty busy.
It’s weird to think about now, because the start of the week was a lot of just being very aware of the coming storm and trying my level best to prepare for it. It is of course fresher’s week at my university and it’s been very very busy for me as for some reason I’m representing two groups this year as well as still trying to sort out my cello (more on that later) and getting into music. There’s been two major themes, really, this week specifically and also just this month in general, which have been a) feeling antisocial and b) feeling let down. The feeling let down is very this period specific and I think really just a series of bad coincidences that have all happened at the same time - I’ve been getting to know a friend of mine better and really wishing I hadn’t, my church is still, well, anyway, and I’ve found out I’m not going to be able to attend any music taster sessions next week, that is if I have an instrument to play at all (this is looking doubtful now).
The feeling antisocial is really unfortunate considering the timing. I do feel like maybe this was inevitable anyway - I was relying on good old autumn sociality, which I think I forgot tends to be very superficial, and I’ve been very quickly finding out I don’t actually want to make new friends, no matter how happy I am to smile and answer questions. I spent a lot of the first half of the week alone and have started spending more time with my friends lately, which has been nice. I think the distance is definitely necessary for me at the moment, but it’s also just so nice to be able to walk 10 minutes to each other’s houses. I’ve also been spending a lot more time with another group of friends that I haven’t really seen for months, which has been great, and we’ve been going out and drinking and clubbing which I forgot how much I loved. It’s so nice to just feel like I’m reentering the world.
I’ve also been getting way back into pop music which has been so fun. Sugar Water by Maude Latour is my album at the moment, I’ve had it on repeat all week and I’m absolutely obsessed. The classical music is continuing though, and I’ve been getting more into it intellectually, which is fun. I’ve been thinking that cello and classical music in general this year are taking the role of my academic interest for this semester or even the academic year. It’s made me think about how this does tend to happen around this time of year, that I get really passionate about learning about something, and I don’t think I had realised just how prevelant it is before, but now this has cemented it as a part of autumn for me I think. Anyway, I’ve been trying to teach myself some music theory and hopefully it won’t be too long until I can put it into practice.
God remains too present to be absent and to absent to be present. This last week has been a lot. It’s been really intense and I know next week will be more so (or maybe less so, because I’ll be more busy and preoccupied and I can just let the busyness carry me through?) and I’ve been varying degrees of upset and frustrated and angry and just feeling like the world has closed itself off to me, and yet the sun keeps streaming through the windows, my friends keep being there for me if I choose to go to see them, classical music is still beautiful to me when I’m not too angry to listen to it, etc, etc. No matter how I feel, the world refuses to be all bad. It is September, still, and God is still here, and he does still care, and he will not let me forget that. Maybe I am refusing to let the light in.
28:09:2025 End of September
Oh God what a week. I can’t wait until I can not say that anymore. I think September has just been kind of shit to be honest which is a shame bc I love September but everything has just kind of been going wrong and I have not been coping with it amazingly.
Fresher’s week was kind of a nightmare really. I mean at the start of the week I had 2 panic attacks which is pretty par for the course for September but I’d gone so long without experiencing anxiety in that direct of a way that it really felt, well. I’ve been trying to be kind to myself and I’m asking for help and setting boundaries and all that, but I won’t lie and say that I’m not on my list of people I’m upset with.
It’s been rough but I’ve been being unnecessarily bitchy. Like I said last week, it’s really unfortunate that this period is coming in tandem with fresher’s because I’ve been so antisocial and frankly just not having any patience or much friendliness beyond the superficial and unfortunately I think some of the freshers may have been on the receiving end of my coldness. It doesn’t help that the groups I’ve been helping out in have been imploding; had I been in a better space, the mistakes people are making would probably be minor annoyances at most, but as it is everything’s really getting to me.
I think of September a lot as a very emotionally vulnerable time, and today I’ve been thinking of anger as a vulnerable emotion to experience. I think maybe because it can make everything affect you so much - when you’re angry about something you can be really obsessed with it, it can really seep through your life and overwhelm you, and it makes it easier to hurt yourself and the people around you. Luckily my friends are being lovely and helpful even when I’ve been being difficult (I should really thank them for that) and my self preservation instincts are strong enough that the most damage I’ve been doing to myself is sleeping in when I know it might fuck up my sleep schedule.
I was intending to write more here, but I’m kind of leaving it too late now and I’m in a bit of a state. Just getting emotionally battered and now physically battered has exhausted me. I’ve worked out some of the faith stuff at least, if the hard way, been composing religious work and writing prayers and going on late night religious/mental health crisis walks which have been surprisingly effective. It does feel now, looking back, like September has been a lot about realising, again, the hard way, that my relationship with God and my relationship with Christianity and the church are very seperate things, and that the latter doesn’t dictate the former. I’m gonna try and have a restful week ahead, and hopefully October is less exhausting.
05/10/2025 Start of October
I feel a bit like I’ve come out the other side, like I’ve survived something, even if that something was just the feeling that my life was falling apart when it truly was not. Not to minimise how much last week sucked, just to say that, the storm having largely passed, I’m realising that I’m fairly unscathed and everything is okay. Which is an odd feeling to have at the end of September and start of October to be honest, but there we go. The new academic year has finally begun and normalcy has returned, as promised.
I was thinking at the start of the week about the inevitability of resolution. How everything falling apart will never last forever, and the nightmare period will always end, the storm will always pass, etc etc. This probably should fit into my everything comes back around philosophy, but the emphasis is different: it’s not that I need something new to begin, more than I need the crisis to end. And hallelujah, it has, mostly. It has in feeling; in practice, apart from lectures restarting, everything is much the same, but I no longer feel like the world is ending and I’m about to kill everyone, so I’m counting it as a win.
The structure of academia has been very much appreciated. I’m remembering how much I like being productive and busy, but it’s difficult to get myself back into the habit of being proactive with how little I’ve been working since May. It’s definitely helping though, to have something that feels so irrelevant to my personal life to sink my teeth into. I’ve been neglecting my music, largely, but in context that feels justified and even necessary, as giving it too much energy just reminds me of what’s not happening right now, and I’m trying to draw my attention away from that.
Autumn is here. I think I’d just about forgotten with all of my personal drama. The leaves are red, the trees are starting to look bare, there are conkers everywhere, and I think the world is just starting to empty out a bit. The warmth of home has been much appreciated, and I’m really getting into my hot drinks, but I have to admit that it’s not been quite so comforting as I was hoping. It’s really been making me feel the lack of the warm spaces I want to be in and the comfort they would bring me - church, trains and buses, my parents’ house. I’ve been finding warmth here - my room here is still lovely, and I’m ever in debt to my friends for their constant welcome, and I went to Quaker meeting earlier and found a good deal of warmth and comfort there, and the various academic libraries I’ve been making my home are fulfilling that role too, as well as the local pubs - but really, I’m incredibly homesick. I miss autumn back home. I miss summer back home, actually, I miss swimming, feeling like a part of nature. But then I experience that a lot more back home regardless, and everything here feels so important somehow that it makes home, where nothing matters except comfort and family and nature, feel so much more important to me. I’m hoping to go home at the start of November, and that should ease my homesickness, but I don’t know if there’s anything I can do long term except accept it.
I’ve also been realising that I really need to start planning for my future more. There are lots of things I intended to do once the autumn got going, and one of the big ones is to actually start making concrete plans for what I’m going to do after I graduate so it stops feeling so scary. I’ve got some ideas and I’ll make an appointment to discuss it eventually - for now it’s just looming over me.
I’m trying to be gentle about everything, to not be too cynical and to forgive myself about my own shortfalls in regard to everything. I know it will all work out. In the meantime my relief for the moment is in dreaming of home. And I love my friends.