Looking at the side of the Edan Dolly homepage, it suddenly dawned on me that Ed and I have been posting on this blog for three years. When we started we were 18, and by the end of this month we will both be 21. Though it doesn’t seem like 3 years when I look back it seems like an eternity. I know I’m wrong, because I study psychology, but it feels as if the last three years have been the most eventful of my life. In February 2009 I knew I was going to Cambridge, but I was still at school, wondering what the point of life was and in love with a girl who didn’t love me back (worst thing ever….!). Though excited about the future I didn’t really see the point: if everything ends and life has no meaning then why bother. Better never to have been born, huh? Now, in February 2012, I am in my final year of university, have a job for September, and am in love with a girl who loves me back. And though I’m still as unsure of the real point of life, and whether I am doing the right thing, I can safely say that I am the happiest I have ever been.

The happiness isn’t because everything is OK, though. I miss Jonny and my grandparents every day. People I loved have left, and at the time it was really difficult to deal with. But, I guess, what the past three years has taught me is that life isn’t about what happens to you, but how you feel about what happens to you. Being able to study the Negativity Bias for my dissertation has confirmed this: people aren’t happy because good things happen to them, they are happy because they have a positive mindset and believe in getting the most out of life. Every day I try to remember how lucky I am, to be studying with great people, to have so many amazing friends and to have a brilliant family. And though life and the future is scary, really really scary, I know that because of them I will do the right thing. The memories I have of Jonny and my Grandparents mean that they’re not gone. They’re as alive in my mind as they could be. I know exactly what Jonny would say about everything I do: mostly ‘dude…’, and I can imagine sitting endlessly with my Grandfather in front of the fire talking about the meaning of things, and making meringues with my Granny.

What else has changed? I still don’t know what I want to do, though I think now I know the sort of thing I want to do. It’s stupid, really, because I knew it all along but just never realised it. Though Compelling Illusions, looking back, was devastatingly pretentious, the aim was to make people realise how similar they are to everyone else. You are not alone. In Cambridge I just keep doing this again and again. I love anonymity because it means you don’t have to be afraid being who you are; it means you can be honest without being judged. And when people are totally honest they show that we all are scared of the same things. We all have the same hopes and dreams, and we all want the best out of life.

Most importantly, though, these three years have proved to me that being alive is absolutely incredible. It can be incredibly depressing and awful, but it gets better. Things change and things get better. Three years ago, when I started this blog with Ed, I could never have imagined that things would be like this now. And now they are, I couldn’t be more grateful to everything and everyone who made it so, and continue to make it so.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

Twenty one the only son,
Figuring out how this race is run,
While the road is slipping past below my feet.
On this road so unforgiving,
Where no one’s ever giving,
An outdated simulation,
That can’t withstand the heat.

I heard its “twenty four there’s so much more”
Of this life we once adored
But brother I am slowly falling to my feet

They lied to us about the creatures on the streets,
They lied to us about the creatures on the streets,
Don’t ever think you’re special,
You are nothing special,
Seven billion people look down at their two feet.

Darling I’ve been broken, I’ve been broken for so long,
On this leaky ship that’s sinking, twelve miles off the shore.
But you gave me life and you gave me love
Now I’m swimming back for more
In this dampened light of dawn
Again into the fore.

Now I’m coming back
I’m coming back for more,
I’ve found my way ashore,
To fall.