What is life

I'm just completely lost right now. I have no idea what I'm doing in life. Sound dramatic? Well how sad is it that I'm already at this point and I am freaking still underage.

I will be taking a gap year. I will fight like crazy until I will be able to. I need to escape. For the longest time, I had a plan. Study like crazy, get into dream course, be rich and live the good life.

Now, as I'm sitting here, still writing my belonging notes when my HSC exam is in two days' time, I am starting to face the reality of this. My dream course was always either law/international studies or journalism/international studies. I would think journalism would suit me better, but the only reason why I put law above journalism was so I could be like F you in the face of my father, his parents and my piano teacher. It's hard to explain but it's a Chinese thing. Obviously I'm not idiotic enough to only just want to do law to rub it in their faces. I'm actually genuinely interested in it (if I only wanted the prestige or whatever I'd be doing medicine because that would be an even bigger deal in my family). Law is something I certainly don't mind doing, and neither is journalism. For some reason the only course I am absolutely 100% certain I want to do is international studies. But I want to still do a dual degree.

I've given up. I won't get into law. Well, when I was a little idiot and used to dream, I wanted to do law/international studies at Sydney uni which is a 99.7 ATAR. The fact that I even thought about that was ludicrous. Clearly I am way to unrealistic and it's too late now to realise I should've had my head out of the clouds long ago. Did I really think my plans would just fall into place magically? I was such an idealist. There were only two things I wanted more than anything, and this probably goes way back to year 9 even. I thought, if these 2 things will come true I will be happy and all the shit that high school has been will be all worth it. Those 2 things were to get into law at Sydney uni and get an encore nomination for music. I was such a little dreamer. The encore nomination, needless to say, didn't happen. Dance of the Reed Flutes killed me. It is a deceptively easy piece but I so hated it. I don't know why my teacher thought it would be a good idea to make me play it (she really doesn't have much HSC experience, despite her claims). It is probably grade 6/7 standard only, and it was the one pieces I butchered each and every time I performed it. I still don't know why. But needless to say you cannot butcher such an easy, well-known piece. It's not difficult to bluff your way through a hard lesser-known piece. Your mistakes don't even get noticed, and if I was still making noticeable mistakes due to nerves or stopping in the middle of pieces after all these years I may as well have quit. But the Nutcracker, for god's sake. Stupidest idea ever to play music from it. It's not even originally composed for piano, and it is so so well known that mistakes are ridiculously noticeable. I would've put much more effort and joy into learning a difficult Chopin ballade, even. I wish she let me choose my own pieces. She probably would've laughed, scoffed at me if I'd told her I wanted to attempt a Chopin ballade. She doesn't realise that the more I enjoy a piece, and the more the piece I enjoy challenges me, the better I play. That's why Gnomenreigen ended up being one of my favourites.

I'm waiting at the moment for my mum to bring dinner (I also asked her to get me some blueberry cheesecake frozen yogurt). Anyway, I always thought I'd get into law at UNSW, if not Sydney. The atar for UNSW is 99.65, but with my 4 bonus points I can get in at 95.65. I didn't think much of it before. I used to think, you hear about all these people that get 99 point whatever. Surely 95 is not that hard if I study my arse off. Key word IF. Well, I'm learning to stop dreaming in that way. 95 is not going to happen. Not when my grades have fallen so much from year 11. Not when I am doing way less in Advanced than what I am capable of. Not when I am screwed for music.

Music is going to be the death of me. That, and Advanced. I don't know what I'm doing in Advanced for paper 2, whatsoever. Haven't started studying for it yet. Haven't done a single practice HSC paper at all for anything. Music 2, thanks to Mr L and my own laziness, I have no idea what to do for the essay. I have never been taught properly. I do not have perfect pitch and can't do melodic dictation at all, or rhythmic for that matter. I can't identify weird string or trumpet symbols on the score. I can't even identify chords properly. Worst of all, it counts for like up to half of my exam mark (can't remember exactly how much, Mr L didn't know either). My composition was shit. Ms B ended up burning the CD for me and I still have the sneaking suspicion she may have purposefully sabotaged it by doing something iffy with the recording before sending it in to the BOS, like altering my composition or cutting it off short or something. I predict the nutcracker performance got me a low B, the Hiscocks a mid B and if I was lucky the Chopin got me a mid A. Combining my musicology, composition and performance marks, I won't even get a high band 5 which is horrible considering the amount of money and time I have wasted on music.

So no law for me. As journalism/int studies is a brand new course at UNSW, I don't know the ATAR requirement for that yet. I predict the ATAR for the course would be around 93.2, as the int studies ATAR is that amount and journalism is lower than that anyway, so for the combined degree they would probably look at the int studies ATAR. For me it would be 89.2 and if I can't even manage that, I may as well freaking put more effort into my con audition as it looks like I'll be stuck with music studies/arts which is like 75 or something. And if I don't get accepted because my audition is too bad? I may as well go overseas for 5 years au pairing my way through my effed up life and return to enrol as a mature age student.

And that's why I want to take a gap year. To get away from it all. I could not stand the thought of going to uni next year not being able to do international studies. I can't stand my judgemental grandparents harping on about how bad music is. I don't think I want to do music anyway. The con is too prestigious, I would feel intimidated there and there are no career paths I can think of that I would choose for arts or music. And if I didn't get into the con, UNSW music is too crappy so that wouldn't be good either.

I need a year all to myself to figure life out otherwise I would just be floating my way through Uni not knowing what the hell I was doing. I want to escape for a year and be able to temporarily forget about all this shit. I want to get away from my mother and having to live with her and her husband. She's bipolar I think. One moment she is narrowly tolerable and then the next she will blow up. I don't predict her husband lasting too long. My mother is too insufferable to have any proper friends or relationships with others. That's why she mopes about in the house all day telling me off.

I think my biggest fear is to be dependent on someone. I was calculating money things the other day, and rent matters if I were to move out. I don't earn anywhere near enough to support myself, even with youth allowance. I hate being dependent on my mother and being obliged to let her have this power over me. She would kill me if I went for the gap year.