Tuesday 21 March

The fact that I’m turning 20 this summer blows my mind. I have lost four years of my life due to my eating disorder. And that’s four years that I can never get back. I missed out on so much. Now? I’m making a vow to never miss out again. I’m going to book that holiday, go on that weekend away, travel, do my year abroad in Germany & Spain next year, go to those concerts… (Taylor not releasing UK tour dates is totally pissing me off!). Do all the things that my ED took away from me.

Basically, I’m finally living my life again. And nothing can stop me from doing that.

Why this sudden realisation? My birthday is in July and most my friends’ birthdays are during the first half of the academic year (they are pretty much a whole year older than me), so I feel like I’m still a kid at 19 and they’ve already turned 20, and 21 at the end of the year. July is still months away but it feels too close all of a sudden. On top of that, my brother has just turned 22 and my boyfriend will soon too. This puts it all into perspective.

We’re growing up, and soon we’ll all be out of Uni and have to enter the real world of a job, bills, taxes… grown-up things. Despite being a Uni student with nothing quite figured out yet, I’m not letting myself worry about that, nor about money. Your 20s are supposed to be about having fun before you settle down and that’s exactly what I’m planning on doing.

I missed out on so much over the last four years, which I plan on never doing again, at least for the next four years of my life. Therefore I’m going to continue into my “clubbing & hungover era” – go out, get drunk, make thousands of memories, be hungover all the next day. The best part of a night out? The morning after, when you join your friends for a hungover brunch and debrief and share all the photos and memory snapshots you took the night before. Because right now, we have no commitments. Those lectures? We can catch up on those. You can never catch up on memories. I learnt that the hard way.

Next year, I’ll be on my own in a foreign city, and in a way, leaving everything behind. The close friends I made this year (all because I chose to actually live my life and join in with everything) won’t be with me. And so for the next couple months in my second year at Uni, I will continue to enjoy my life, go out, and have fun with these friends and make the most of my time left here before everything changes right at the end of summer. I’ll take each day one at a time, living in the present moment and deter the worries of tomorrow.

Why worry about tomorrow or next week when you can enjoy today?

That’s what I’ll leave you with for now, as I jet off to Berlin for a few days with these friends from Uni and scout out all the best clubs, bars, cafes for when I move there in September.

Yours,

Ellie, Pepetoe.

• Instagram