Tuesday, 13 March 1979 – A Reflection
Diary: A mix of routine and emotional turmoil—training in the morning, another flat tyre, a high-energy water polo game in which I scored. But the actual weight of the day came when I saw G.
G—my teenage crush, the girl who once broke my heart and awakened my soul. Seeing her again sent me into a tangled web of love and hate. At the time, I was utterly consumed by my feelings for her, a rollercoaster of hope and rejection played out over several years.
This is the detailed love chart, using different colors to map the highs and lows of my emotions toward her. I also made drawings of her—some affectionate, others later adorned with fangs when bitterness crept in.
At one point, G seemed to return my interest—only to reveal that it was a tactic to steer me away from someone else. She was always the orchestrator, keeping me within reach but never quite letting me close. Later, she set me up with her friend, who became my first girlfriend for 18 months. In hindsight, all of it was just teenagers at play, but at the time, it felt devastating.
G and I remained friends into our early twenties, but our paths diverged. While I was at Oxford, she attended Secretarial College, and later built a career as an estate agent and a successful interior designer. She embraced a world of affluence, mixing with the famous, the notorious, and even royalty. It was a world I stepped into once or twice, briefly caught up in the fancy nightclubs and flirtations, but it wasn’t for me. She was in her element; I would have needed to belong to a life of inherited wealth, which I didn’t.
Looking back, G always had a clear vision of the life she wanted. She adored Jilly Cooper novels and Dallas and pursued that world with unwavering ambition. In contrast, my journey took me down a different path—one of creativity, curiosity, and occasional detours. While G was adept at navigating a world where money and connections ruled, I often became an observer rather than a participant.
Something is fascinating about how we shape our ambitions in youth and how, in some cases, they come to fruition. For G, the glamorous life wasn’t just a dream; it became her reality. For me, the path was less scripted, filled with exploration and reinvention. Even now, I find myself reflecting on those contrasts—not with regret, but with curiosity about the different roads we take and the forces that shape them.
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