I know there’s a spider somewhere in my flat. I spotted him when I came in late the other night, perched brazenly on the ceiling coving – too high up for me to do anything but acknowledge his existence and accept that we would be living together for the foreseeable future. The next morning, he was nowhere to be seen, and now I am imagining him tucked away in obscure places around my living room, waiting to reveal himself at the worst possible moment. Georgia said he’s just looking for a girlfriend. I think he’s just looking for trouble.

At the end of August I moved out of my apartment in Notting Hill. I left the home I had shared with my best friends in the entire world, and moved in with a (wonderful, but) complete stranger in Islington; uncertain about each decision I was making, but making them anyway. It’s peculiar to experience two such opposing emotions at once: the ache to stay put, the overwhelming need to move on. I spent the entirety of the 3 years I lived in West London proudly proclaiming that I would never leave; but nothing ever really goes to plan, and it’s ironic that this so often takes me by surprise.

In living together for so long, my friends and I became extensions of one another: it was us and the flat, and everything else just followed. We lived on top of each other – sometimes it was perfect, sometimes it drove us mad. I never really pictured a time that it would come to an end, but it did, as all things do. Saying goodbye to the home that had seen us through some of the most formative years of our lives was no easy feat. (Though trying to pack everything from said apartment into a singular Zipcar van was even harder.) I’ve never laughed and cried and dreamed so much in one place. I leave a piece of myself in that tiny three-bed with the beautiful windows.

Being 20-something can make you feel both invincible and incredibly vulnerable at the same time. Just when you think you’ve maybe got it all sussed out, your life can turn completely on its axis, and suddenly everything you thought you knew has been entirely rearranged. This year has perhaps been one of the most challenging of my life, but in the same breath I have never felt more like myself. Everything that happens to us, everything that forces us to confront the furthest corners of ourselves, can only serve to teach us more about who we are. Or, better yet, it teaches us that there are infinite versions of who we’re capable of becoming.

The truth is, I spend so much time thinking about what might happen, where I might go, when reality always kicks in to remind me that it’s entirely unpredictable. I learned that your best summer can also be your worst summer, that your crappy week always has the potential to become your most memorable weekend. There’s no formula or pattern to the way things go, they just are. I love my friends for convincing me to go to Glastonbury this year, and for all the ways they unpick my imagined limitations. I love them for reassuring me that I would be safe, and happy, and that, despite my elaborate anxieties of everything that might go wrong, we would have so much fun together. They were right of course, but I already trusted them inherently.

It’s funny when you realise that your notion of ‘some day‘ has become your Sunday, and the things you thought you were supposed to worry about have become the least important on your list. But there’s a comfort in the not knowing – in the acceptance that it’s all going to happen anyway, so you might as well let it. Sometimes you’re waiting to see if one decision will mean your entire life is going to change, and sometimes you’re just waiting for the spider in your living room to come out of his hiding place.