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.

It’s five minutes till midnight and a page-wide banner coruscates across the BBC homepage proclaiming “Test your morality: Discover your personal dimensions of morality.” Despite having a case presentation for my consultant due the next day which I hadn’t yet started, I decided this was a voyage of self-discovery which couldn’t wait; I had read that it would take 25 minutes but this was a small price to pay for the lifetime of enlightenment this carefully engineered banner assured me would ensue.

The next morning we stood in the surgical theatre observing our consultant finish off the morning list of procedures. Hair sprouted from his ears like withering anemones, his stern eyes fixed constantly on the procedure, incongruous with his short, jester-like constitution. As he ordered his registrar to suture shut the incision and took off his bloodied scrubs, my mind had already wandered out the door and was headed towards the hospital canteen. The consultant walked past us pointing at the solitary computer in theatre and said with the characteristic concision of a surgeon “Ok, presentations, go,” I saw my colleagues’ mouths separate a little, contemplating protest, we were scheduled to present late afternoon but nevertheless I was nudged forward to begin. Around six slides in, a wry smile spread across his face, it was the smile of recognition with a tinge of disgust, at the poorly tailored presentation and slowly his eyes began to loosen and stare straight through the monitor, a scalding excoriation brewing as I continued. Without warning and in a fit of pique, he began to dismantle the presentation with vexatious phlegm, careful to paste over any glaringly obvious malicious intent with a demure sigh and a longing hand gesture. He demanded that the presentation be repeated at our next scheduled meeting, and moved on. At the beginning of the year we had been told not to take humiliation personally, as it was inevitable from such a highly charged, hierarchical workplace structure, but as I stood there vacant eyed, waiting for my colleagues to complete their polished presentations, it was a profound moment of realisation that this career will be relentlessly unforgiving to those who choose to treat it as a mistress.

University is a forge in which to sculpt a variety of tools to add to our burgeoning metaphorical toolbox, to increase our preparedness for challenges we are likely to face in the real world; procrastination is the wooden spoon being lovingly lathed by students across the country, some even taking time to laboriously carve out intricacies into the handle. In this lifelong race to cerebralise vast text books, an obsidian work ethic is a pre-requisite to success; it requires a steadfast and unfaltering commitment coupled with an inexorable sense of purpose. On such a course, where many agree that a Calvinistic work ethic is rewarded more than intellectual brilliance, though the latter is of course beneficial, one would presume that most participants would not display a superlative proclivity for procrastination, yet having spent nearly three years studying medicine it is clear to see that pathological procrastination amongst medical students is rife, and is slowly poisoning otherwise capable minds from reaching full potential.

When I went for my medical school interview, I had rehearsed a repulsively sterile answer along the lines of, “I look forward to a lifetime of learning, and a career in medicine is one which will satisfy my inquisitive nature,” of course I was lying through my carefully flossed teeth, but it is precisely because of the fact that medicine is one of the few degree choices which truly forms a lifelong commitment, that the months seem more expendable than they actually are, and this is perhaps why the idea of laying idle at the promise of making up for it later can be so alluring. Procrastination is the parasite of excellence, which is best addressed early before it is allowed to germinate and enisle you to a lifetime of mediocrity; if brilliance is your ultimate goal, having a lifetime to master your craft must never be an excuse to delay but rather become an opportunity to excel that little bit further, regardless of the diminishing returns.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling