The Dark Summer (That Changed My Life)

Ah, Summer. The time of year where to-do lists really get their time to shine as everyone promises themselves that they will have a barbeque, kiss in the rain, make lots of craft, hold down a job, stay out all night, meet new people, explore a forest...

It's also the time of year when endless blog posts come up about this, with people posting goals (whether it be for a bikini body, achievements or simply things they would like to do). Often, because of this, summer is treated as this golden period of opportunity where life is at its fullest, especially while you are still at school and the adrenaline of freedom kicks in. There are endless questions on how you will be spending summer and the thought of merely sitting at home is berated.

My experiences of summer have been varied but I can say that the best summers haven't been the ones where I have been on lots of holidays or explored the world around me, but the ones where I have grown, changed, matured and tried not only new things, but challenging things. The most memorable summer is the summer of 2009, the summer where I had no friends to hang out with other than my sister.

I had made a wrong move, lost all my friends and was living in guilt and shame. I wanted school to end badly but found myself even more isolated trapped inside my house. My only outings were with my sister to Shakeaway (I calculated that I spent around £40 on Shakeaway in the space of a few weeks that summer) where we would sing walking along the road and wear matching harem trousers. I watched a copious amount of TV but felt a real emptiness in my life. Yet I was moved. I was forced to confront the mistakes I had made which caused this dramatic cut off from community. Until that point, there was always someone to point the finger towards, someone who provoked what I had done. In a summer of loneliness I saw that I had been hiding behind that and exposed a lot of lies that I was believing about myself, others and the world around me. I had been believing that violence and anger were excusable reactions if provoked, that my insecurity absconded me from punishment, that paranoia was damaging my friendships and how I saw the world around me, that my heart and all its desires were set on all the wrong things. I was moved, I believe by God, to a state where I realised that I needed to be forgiven, and that I didn't need to work for it. I longed for my friends to show forgiveness to me as well as the forgiveness I believe that I already have received through faith. But then my thoughts progressed: I longed to have the strength and courage to forgive the friends who had given up on me, provoked me, made me feel insecure and paranoid and anxious, had failed to support me through my counselling and therapy and who I didn't trust enough to tell them how I was feeling. I longed to repair relationships, to regain confidence in my abilities and release anxieties that were weighing me down.

I found that at the foot of a cross and it changed me. Never before had pain brought me such joy. It is a dark summer that ended in light.

I remember the first day at school when we got our timetables and the girl who I had directed my violence at the June before was in around two thirds of my classes. I braced myself for a hard year of proving myself and trying really hard to change but there was something else working which released me from that responsibility. A few nights later, a facebook friend request that had earlier been denied set my heart on fire. Forgiveness was mine. Friendship was restored. Faith became real and exciting.

I was baptised the next January and a journey began that took me to other summers on beaches in Wales that stirred up a heart in me to take 'good news' to London, to walk over Tower Bridge everyday to embark on a journey to the East side to serve lattes and engage with community. Five years after the dark summer, my life is changed and renewed and my faith is as real and exciting as ever.

Maybe your summer is shaping up well, maybe it is looking miserable. Don't romanticise summer as if it is a magical period of contentment and happiness - it surely won't live up to it and be filled with more boredom that BBQ's I'm sure. Summer is a chance, if you have the time or invest in the time, to search your soul and find what is wanting. It might be a qualification, an experience of volunteering, a friendship that has been slack, it might be rest. It might be discovering what true hope and life is once all the routine and rhythms have been removed. I hope that you will find it where I did.

-Antonia

Scrapbooking Summer

While uploading pictures on facebook, twitter or instagram is a great way to share photographs and memories, I never feel like they satisfy or give such special memories the attention they deserve. Sure, for the half an hour you flick through this album (and the hours that follow while the people in the photos comment on them) the memories are kept alive, celebrated, and sometimes mocked. But until a few years later when someone decides to rustle up an awful image of you looking windswept with a grimace on your face, it is rare that you look upon these memories with the same fondness. It's onto the next album, and the next, and the next... and all these precious times become dust as the present excitement ensues.

This summer was hugely special to me: I finished school, had my first holiday alone with a friend (where else but Disneyland?), volunteered for four weeks of it, and generally tasted independence in a way which I hadn't before. I celebrated the end of this routine that I had inhabited for the last 7 years with friends in the form of a ball (fancy gowns and aching feet included), went to Wimbledon for the first time, met up with the CU to pray for the year ahead, and watched a youth leader I love get married. It was a pretty exciting time because I knew that the future was just ahead of me and all my friends, and I had no idea what was coming next. At the same time I was trying to do all I could with my time as well as spending time with my family before making the move to London, and making the most of time spent without the pressures of work or study. It felt wrong to document these things on facebook albums that will only hide away, and not to give these memories the attention they deserve.

So for the first time, I gave scrapbooking a go. And after spending hours in my free time on weekends making it, I have (in mid-November) completed it. Not only has it been fulfilling my inner crafty side that has been itching to come out since I dropped Art after AS Levels, but it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the opportunities I had, the friends I made, the laughs I had forgotten about in the blur of my new life in London. It made me smile on the Saturdays when I was feeling tired and, while my housemates were out with friends, pretty lonesome.

Here are some pictures! (and by some I mean pretty much most of the book, but with a few left out - I still wish to surprise my friends when I see them at Christmas..)

One of my favourite things about scrapbooking was getting to use up all the leaflets and pamphlets from Wimbledon and Disneyland in order to make backgrounds and decorate the pages without them wasting away in a box somewhere, or on a pinboard where they are bound to rip and get all dog-eared!

I took my disposable camera with me to Disneyland, and while not many of the photographs were useable (getting tourists to take photos on something so outdated is not the most reliable thing!), I love the way that this photograph turned out, with all the random colour filters contrasting with the grey sky. It pretty much emulates our over-excited mood of the magic of Disney in spite of the weather!

I edited these photographs before having them printed - I just love how this page is like a little momento to the old photographs taken of Disneyland before there was colour photo, and is a particular highlight of the book for me. I like having the courtesy photographs against the old-style 'shoppe' background and the man with the tophat, as well as the old car against the palace. 

The light show was so spectacular that I had to restrain myself from putting all the photos in the book - in the end only three made it and had individual pages so they could be shown off to their fullest, reflecting the fact that the light show was a real highlight of my whole summer (these captions are starting to get a little GCSE Art-like, aren't they?)

After the neat and prim nature of the Disney pages, UBM comes with 3 pictures on each page, all cut up and jagged and hidden by fancy cutting of the paper. It really was that hectic while I was there, I thought I would never recover from such exhaustion!

There are probably many different arty things I could say about this - how I used specific colours for the pages to reflect the photographs (the Wimbledon pages were all green and lilac, the Disney ones mainly pink!) or how I tried to match the mood or the nature of the event to the way I decorated, or the way I moved chronologically through the summer, or how I tried not to use the same patterns in two chronological pages so that each page was unique - but it would be pretty tiresome and take away from the fact that I made this to be kept, laughed at and loved for years to come. I even left pages to add more photographs to if I fancied!

Hope you have enjoyed this post - 'tis a little different to my normal rant-about-London style but I find that it's always nice to live vicariously through other peoples' memories.

-Antonia

P.S. All these photographs were taken on my HTC One. Not sure how the quality translates!