The Weather of Uncertainties

The Late Winter of 2025

It is the night of Christmas Day. After packing my whole life into a large suitcase, I am chugging my fourth beer after having several sweet, sweet pegs of raspberry vodka to suppress the melancholy emotions flowing high inside me.

I see a room full of people with whom I have bonded well over the course of my master’s degree, and now I have to leave all of this in less than 48 hours.

But I need to clarify two things beforehand. First, I am not an alcoholic. I am a serious casual drinker: serious about drinking and casual about liver health. Of course, I am also on team no-smoking. I use a hack for that. It is called: drunken cigarette smoke goes into the trance of your mind rather than your lungs and blood, so you are safe.

Second, I am not sad to leave the room filled with these people. I mean, they are adult friendships, so you understand. Adult friendship is just another symbiotic relationship; while some are mutualistic by nature, most are parasitic. In this case, I am the parasitic one, as I still have not paid for all those trance-diffusing cigarettes.

I felt worse about leaving this foreign land as a loser who could not find a job and was now quitting, going back to his mama to be coddled.

But as I tried to comprehend every part of the night, with my friends raising their beer bottles and saying “Salud” to the fun times they had shared with me, I had this strange feeling that I was not done with this tiny little island.

I do not know why I was so strongly confident about coming back, because I had no plan or intention of landing on this soil again. I was so freaking frustrated by the expensive rent and bills and by landing zero interviews in the last 1.5 years.

This country made me feel worthless, as though my ideas and writing skills were null and void to these content agencies. In my sober senses, I would never have wanted to return. Yet I kept telling my drunk peers, in a very drunken tone, that I would be back.

I would be back for the “termination” of my mental health.

Flashback

Summer of 2025

There is going to be a lot of packing and unpacking in this story—late disclaimer alert.

As I unpacked my suitcase and set up my wardrobe and room again with the clothes I had brought back from my trip home during the semester break, my crying became louder and harder with every article of clothing I picked up from the suitcase.

The suffocation of giving up, of accepting that I would not land a job in this country, had completely consumed my will to write. I was dying to tell my family at the airport that I did not want to go back.

When I came to the UK for the first time, I was extremely excited and entered the airport with a rush to reach London as quickly as I could. But this time, I moved very slowly through the entrance line, staring at my family so that they might catch the hint that I did not want to go back.

I was simply done with the whole thing without even having completed my master’s degree.

A lot happened that June. My grandmother passed away.

After school used to finish at two in the afternoon, my mother, sister, and I used to go to her house for lunch every day. Whenever she cooked some boring vegetables for my sister and mother, she would make my favourite dish separately because I was a picky eater. That dish was only for me.

She never asked anything of me, but throughout my childhood, she told me to do only one thing: make my parents proud by building a good career through hard work.

While all my maternal cousins are very successful in their lives, I am the only one who is still struggling. It all stings because, after her sons and daughters, she loved me the most, and she died without seeing me do the only thing she had asked me to do.

I had given up all hope of finding validation for my art. Even my college professor was a very strict fellow who always gave harsh feedback on all my assignments. At this point, I was even doubtful about whether I would pass my course.

So, what did I do? I completely shut down my creative side.

The Same Winter of 2025, One Month Before Christmas Day

Woohoo, it is finally done.

After June, I told myself to just survive all of this until November. When I was done with my master’s degree, I would leave. Leave, go back home, and start again.

I thought that if I went back home as a loser, I might stop procrastinating on my writing because I would have nothing to lose and would be carrying too much guilt not to move my arse and start typing.

After having a very hard time finishing my final dissertation, receiving no validation, and risking everything to make a documentary, I messed that up too. I submitted my project one minute after the submission deadline.

My batchmate casually mentioned that even if you submitted it one second late, they would not consider it.

When I received my result, I booked my flight home for 26 December.

For the whole month after that, I felt rescued from the terrorising UK job market. My friends tried to stop me and asked me to stay for at least six months and give the job hunt a proper, fully devoted attempt.

But I was convinced. It was not as though there was any doubt; I was completely satisfied with my decision. There was not a shred of a thought about turning back.

Late Winter of 2025, the Night After the Party

The party hangover was still straining my head, but with whatever brain capacity I had left, I spent the entire flight thinking about my dissertation. I thought that I should have been more serious about it and that perhaps the result could have been different, but I was too tired of this place to even care anymore.

So, with a heavy heart and heavier debt, I returned to my native land.

I was so done with everything associated with my life in UK, that for the next 20-24 days I didn’t even unpack my suitcase.

Early Winter 2026

Ugh, again.

As I unpacked my life from a large suitcase after some 20 days from New Year’s Eve, this time with more guilt and a bigger hit to my ego, I knew that I had to do something. I had to write something. I had to show my grandmother something.

So, basically, there were now more reasons for me not to procrastinate.

We started again, from the kid in the classroom making a silly joke to the loser trying to write about the complex world for the same reasons: appreciation, attention, and validation.

I unpacked my suitcase and placed my laptop on the table—not to write anything, but to apply for my Graduate visa, because my Student visa expired in some days, and I could not apply for a new one from outside the UK.

Again, night would fall at 3 p.m.—and, for me, every time I opened my laptop.