my situation
 

rewgves

Good luck!

I think its a good thing for you to move and you will be a stronger person for having done it.

Ni'k, check websites like gumtree for cheap accomodation. Do you have any particular skills that could get you a job straight away? You don't want to end up in London with little money and without a job, it would land you in more trouble than you're in already.

I second Sarramkrop's advice. London is a very tough city to survive in at the best of times and it's made doubly harder if you just turn up with nothing.

It might be an idea to see if you can enroll onto a college course here. that'd give you a real sense of focus as well as provide you with a way of meeting people - many of whom will be new to the city themselves and so in roughly the same boat. Magazines such as Floodlight are great for listing all available courses and, in some cases, you could land a room on campus - or at least find people to share with. If you have problems getting floodlight in NI, pm me your current address and I'll post a copy over to you.

It's good that you're feeling able to leave but, as Sarramkrop says, you really do need to plan ahead in order to avoid any possible recurrencies of previous problems. Try and get hold of a copy of the Time Out London for Londoners guide, which provides an excellent over-view of the ins and outs of the city. And needless to say, any further help you need, I, and I'm sure other london-based members, will be more than happy to give you whatever advice we can.

Yes, that's very good advice from demonrail too.

It's not an impossible thing for you to do, many other young people work and study here, it's just that you don't want to get caught catching up with problems that would affect, for instance, your concentrating on studying. You'd have to put up with problems anyway, still you want to make it as easy for you as possible in order not to have to worry all the time about how to pay rent, bills etc.

Also, try to romanticise the place the least you can, it helps seeing things for how they really are, therefore a plan of action becomes more realistic and within reach.

moving to a different town will not solve yr mental problems (assuming you take yr brain with you), and as mentioned, moving to a big city with no money at all is likely to make you worse off.

good luck though.

Here's the Floodlight website. You should find all the information about available courses here.

http://www.floodlight.co.uk/pls/courses/fl_home.pg_home

that's not that much different than where i live :)

It's reassuring to know places and people are basically the same all over the world, isn't it.

it actually is. that said... any place can be wonderful too. it's what you make of it.

I hope you're right. I'm still trying to adjust to South Carolina.

you will. have you made many social contacts?

I know what you mean, but wonderful might be too strong a word. I know Belfast where ni'k is from quite well and there are parts which are lovely, but it's not a place where the word 'wonderful' springs easily to mind.

well that's personal perspective i suppose.

i think oklahoma is wonderful generally.

Some. A few pretty good friends, in fact. I just am not feeling the love for the place. It's boring, backward, even in its larger cities.

It has nice vacation spots, especially in the mountains and near the ocean, so I guess I shouldn't bitch. There's some beauty here and there. But I'm more of a city boy than a nature boy, and there's not much in the way of a good cosmopolitan city here.

Let me put it in terms of what I gave up back in the small college town I came from:

--Good independent bookstores.
--More than one independent record store in a 50-mile radius.
--Non-chain restaurants of any kind.
--A range of really good domestic microbrews in almost every grocery store, so many I couldn't possibly sample them all in a year if I bought a different six pack every week.
--Reasonably priced organic food and other coop type grocery stores. (There are a couple here but they are outrageously overpriced.)
--Quality department stores like Nordstroms.
--A vibrant local band kind of music scene.
--An accessible, large public library.
--Art museums.
--Public transportation. (None here in my town now. None! Amazing...)

All this in a town of under 50,000, too. I felt like I was living in NYC.

So I guess it has a lot to do with being spoiled by all that.