Southampton Loves Me

I was in London with my awesome friends Cecile and Rosemarijn and now I miss them and am also ill and feeling lethargic and a bit lonely so I need to write to make myself feel less useless. 

I need to complain about something for a second. Dear every person I meet who doesn't live in Southampton and has never actually been there: don't tell me Southampton is a shit town. First of all, I don't care about your opinion. Also, it is actually a very enjoyable place for me to live. It is lively, big enough for there to be lots of stuff to do but small enough for it to still have a certain cuteness to it. I also definitely benefit from the fact that it isn't as big and popular as where I'm used to living: I live on the ground floor in a big, beautiful shared house with a huge garden and parking spaces. In Amsterdam I live in a tiny studio flat in a 15 storey concrete building with a shared kitchen in a bad area for the same amount of rent. There is literally not one thing that I don't like about Southampton as a city. You know what's a shit place to live? Uithoorn, where I grew up. There is absolutely fuck all to do because it's too close to Amsterdam to even try to be exciting in itself, as a teenager living there the absolutely only fun thing in town was the bus to the big city, yet most of the people living there hardly ever leave the town except perhaps to go to equally miserable shitholes like Aalsmeer, Mijdrecht or Kudelstaart. Even having lived in a 'cool' and exciting place like Amsterdam for the past few years, living in ANY city feels like a privilege when you're from a dead, grey, suburban town. The most ironic thing is actually that people who themselves still live in towns very similar to Uithoorn have told me that they would only move abroad if it was to some big exciting city like London or New York. And somehow make it looks like I am the one 'playing it safe' by moving to a smaller city. And last but not least, I actually came here to study at the university and not to be a cool hipster. I was very, very privileged to get the chance to study abroad at all. Some people can't even go to university in their own area, let alone do a year abroad in their favourite country. What I mean to say is, fuck you I like where I live a lot and surely that's more important than the opinions of people I have absolutely nothing to do with.

Not caring about other people's opinions is, in fact, still a radical thing to do. So I look in the mirror and reassure myself, I AM AWESOME, I AM A WRITER, I AM BEAUTIFUL, I AM SUCCESSFUL, I AM INTELLIGENT, I AM WORTH IT, and I strut down the streets of the city I choose to live in in my Jeffrey Campbell boots, with a peacock feather in my hair. I am making my own dreams come true, and the world's insistence that it should have an opinion on that can never, ever bring me down.