College/university’s out, the sun’s making an attempt at showing its face – albeit a piss poor one, and the prospect of having sweet sod all to do for months seems damn appealing. This is, until you realise that you’re no longer fourteen, your lease ends in two weeks and you’re flirting with becoming the two dread words: “homeless” and “bum”. Then Summer becomes a snarky little bitch of dread – gone are the days of wasting your mid-teens holidays getting messed up on the local park with a tactfully scavved bottle of Lambrini. Instead, my summer has thus far consisted of: countless hours spent crying in bed staring at yet another data-entry-at-minimum-wage job that I still bizarrely won’t get; trawling miles (oh, just approximately ten) through business parks in ridiculous creeper boots just because I’m going for a fashion-related interview; receiving all too many ‘sorry, can’t today – got work’ texts from my friend circle; spending almost a week in bed because – for some reason – factor 50 still isn’t enough for my glacier-white skin and I started flaking off like something off a horror film. At the moment, I’m seething in a little pit of financial and motivational despair, throwing out emails like sporadic paper aeroplanes, in the seemingly vain hope that someone will notice my potential. At present, the only person to do such was some woman from a stripper club – where I had applied for bar work in a desperate attempt at income – who, upon seeing my CV picture (FYI: don’t put a picture from a party where you’re a mass of cheekbone and red lipstick on your CV), claimed there were no bar jobs left and wanted me to come in for an “exotic dancer” interview. And such is the colour of my summer, as it stands.

The only upside to this entire sorry affair is that, after the sunburn fiasco, I have emerged facially reinvigorated from my bed of tears and dairy free mint chocolate – and 99% spot free after a short, but franticly needy relationship with a tube of aqueous cream. Perhaps Simple or Garnier will pick me up off the street for their next ad, or I’ll enter BINTM and be the founding face behind their “Joke Applications” section. I’m narked off. It’s one of those weeks: I’m looking at my blog through sceptical eyes, sneering at the poxy pageviews since I started being a perpetual sulk – I even got to the disgraceful stage of lying in bed this morning, scanning the Twitter profiles of successful bloggers/writers that I know, eyeing up tweets about their latest achievements, and having to stop scrolling as I eventually couldn’t read through the pesky tears that’d emerged. I’ll be grand in a couple of days, something will pick up and I’ll have a new lease of life – a new project to get my sorry ass set on. But I thought I’d write this post for those of you who have been, or are still in this position too. I get a little pissed off with how blindly positive the beauty/fashion blogging world can be – given we spend about 75% of our posting time yannering on about how ‘AMAZE’ the latest BB/CC/DD/ZZ cream or ZARA piece is – yeah sure, we want our posts to be as beautiful as the things we’re writing about, but sometimes it’s good to just get out the virtual face-wipes and just see a blogger behind all the ‘lol – #lookatallmyfollowers’.

So this is for us, sulky bloggers – for anyone who’s felt a bit shite recently and needs a little pick-me-up. I’m writing this for all of us, myself included, as this is going to be a little brainstorm of things that we can get working on to stop ourselves from being stuck in that aforementioned pit of despair:

• On the Job Hunt: Explore all avenues. Apply for every little bastarding thing on Gumtree/Indeed/Reed/Job Centre – I don’t care if it takes two days (yes, it took me that long – and you wonder why unemployment is making me bitter) – you’re only going to get something if you get out there. Join a temp/recruitment agency: I’m signed onto one in Lancaster that helped me out a decent amount with admin jobs last summer, so I’ll be joining one in Manchester this time for when I move. Get eagle-eyed with Twitter – there are lots of internships/jobs that get mentioned everyday, my favourite is @UKfashionintern. Finally, get old fashioned and trawl your local shopping centre/food district: I’m going to be marching around Manchester, especially the Arndale, laden with CVs. 
• On Beating the ‘Average’ Fear: This is one of my biggest issues. Sometimes I get myself in a state of – ‘well, they’re doing so much better than me, look how average I am right now: what’s the bastarding point’? Arguably juvenile, I think it happens to us all sometimes and it’s just something to work through. My worst habit in these situations, is lying in bed all day – mining through the work and accolades of others, often in a cruel bout of masochism, but occasionally in a bid to seek inspiration and motivation. Just don’t sleep all day – that shit is bad. Nobody wants to hire the person who goes to sleep at 5am and wakes up at 3pm. 
• On Post-Summer: For the two preceding summers I’ve had that have led up to a university year so far, I’ve had a slacker tendency to just not bother doing any reading and then tackle the beast head on when it comes to the beginning of term. This year, my final year, is going to be different – it’s time I grew up, had a good sniff of the coffee and got down to some serious business with Hemingway…