Inspiration- For MTV Sticky

When you’re a graduate, in your twenties, it’s hard to stop and think about who or what inspires you when you’re on your own warpath to success.

That was until last summer. Two things seemed to appear out of nowhere at a critical point in my postgraduate life.

I was living at home, again, working my two part-time jobs, again, at an ice cream hut by the sea and a pizza place. The little money I earned was spent on beer, food, cinema trips and petrol so I could leave town once in a while.

A friend and I were asked to housesit for another friend whilst she went off to sun herself in the Dominican for 2 weeks. The mini independence was great and whilst settling down one night we read one of the newspaper supplements that had been left out. One of the features was about a young blogger, Emma Koenig.

Koenig’s career had begun with a series of blog posts and funny sketches depicting the life of an over educated, under employed twenty something – these have now been published in the book Fuck! I’m in my twenties!. I related to the anxiety of living with your parents again, the embarrassment of telling old class mates what you’re doing for a living now and appreciated someone telling other twenty year olds the truth about life after university.

At the same time as this, Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls had just come under my radar, it was refreshing and comforting to watch real women go through the same realities as my friends and me. And the best part was, both Dunham and Koenig were brutally honest about their bodies, their fears, their relationships with men, their friends and their family.

I’m a blogger and an aspiring writer, and there are times when I think a mundane job in a small seaside town would make for an easier, happier life. I’m now living in London, where I’ve wanted to live for quite some time now and I have a job that could possibly lead to a future in writing. I’m poor, constantly terrified of being on my own forever, endlessly hearing about friends living it up in Thailand, Australia, America – the list goes on. But this is real and thanks to Koenig and Dunham I know there’s hundreds even thousands of other young women like me, ready to make a stamp on the world. So watch this space boys.