Normal People

The thing they don’t tell you when you’re fourteen and wishing you were seventeen, or twenty, or even twenty five is that you’ll be so lonely. The reason why Sally Rooney’s Normal People shaped fist was able to thrust its way into our chest and squeeze our heart to the point of breathless tears is because loneliness can feel like the ugliest kept secret in your twenties – and there’s no feeling like the cleansing rain after the unearthing of your best kept one.

It’s like with the beginning of every new chapter comes the promise that by the end, you’ll

have more freedom, be happier and all around, better. And yet, the start of university coming off the end of senior year can feel world ending. The movies promised us house parties, countless friends, the time for idle thoughts and fast paced love affairs. The reality is snoozed alarms, days of grey, getting lost in introspection, feeling illiterate in a class of bilinguals, health scares and worrying about the future while dreading the tomorrow of it all. When Normal People came out we all let out the breath we had long been holding. The ‘thank god the jig is up’ breath. Life isn’t perfectly curated Pinterest boards and witty captions but awkward, muddled and lonely day to days with occasional injections of light and laughter. It’s like the world needs to break us before it can be-friend us. It’s only once we feel broken that we are able to appreciate the mundane-ness of it all (that maybe you don’t need to have fifty friends but one or two will suffice). Suddenly, life is filled with simple pleasures and going to the library becomes a luxury, on par with a good cup of coffee and a sweet treat.

The thing they don’t tell you is life isn’t like F.R.I.E.N.D.S with a friendship group that needs no contact from the outside world to be content and have fun, but looks a whole lot more like the inside of Connor Waldron’s doctor’s office. The thing they don’t tell you is you’re going to have to learn to live with yourself and it’s going to be uncomfortable, awkward and painful at first, but then after a while, you’ll find a rhythm and the wisdom to know that nothing good happens after 10pm and there’s not much that can’t be fixed by a good night’s sleep.