Hello world.

I’ve been on a bit of an X-factor style emotional journey recently, so because I am saintly and good I am going to share my findings with you so that we can all benefit from the results. I have been finding out about What Matters, both to me and to other people, and how understanding What Matters can change both your understanding of yourself and your understanding of everyone around you, and your subsequent relationships with them. So, with the emotional trash-cum-introduction-to-Blue-Peter out of the way, let us proceed with What Matters.

It is my firm belief that everyone has a passion of some description. If you turn on Classic FM, you can hear the music of a people (who will not be slaves again) doing What Matters to them, and sharing their passion with the world through their performance. If you turn on BBC4 and watch Mary Beard, you can see that her passion is history. If you are not that cultured you can see, I dare to say, the hoards of Beliebers, and while my previous knowledge on this estranged group denotes that they are psychologically disturbed, depraved, deranged lunatics, further research dictates that this species, best found in their natural habitat of Twitter, are simply indulging their passion- much like fans at a football match, or festival goers at a festival for Real Music- even if their passion is Justin Bieber.

My personal passion is Ancient History. I have bored many a friend with facts about the Romans, and combined with my passion for musicals, have seen Jesus Christ Superstar too many times for any sane human being to reasonably have sobbed along to. This is just my passion, and the people who understand that, alias my friends and history teacher, can relate more easily with this knowledge. This is because they too have passions, and once you understand that every single person has something that Truly Matters, you instinctively become closer to them. The moment when you find your drama queen friend reading a door-stop on Stanislavski because she loves acting is the moment when you truly understand What Matters to her and are a better friend for it. The moment when you discover that the pass-code for His (you-know-that-Him-the-one-you-like)’s phone is the date of the battle of Bosworth Field because he loves history is the moment when you know what matters to both of you.

This essay is called What Matters, and I guess that for other people there are more important things that matter than what I’m going to talk about. Things like food and water and shelter, and so I’m sorry that I’m not going to tell you how important these things are to me, because they are, and I hope it doesn’t seem churlish to talk about something so trivial when there are people out there for whom the topics I’ve just snubbed would make a world of difference. But as much as these things do matter to me, blame Western civilisation, but there is something else that matters more.

The thing I’m going to write about isn’t particularly news-worthy material. If it was news, it would be the kind of bulletin they shoot to fill a gap on a particularly news-lacking day, possibly about the rise of heating bills or a decrease in tractor sales in rural areas. Fluff. Fillers. But to me, this IS the news, and this is What Matters. This is the thing that occupies my time and that I worry about when everyone else is worrying about nuclear war. And while I know there are more worthwhile Things That Matter- North Korea, the Eurozone crisis, immigration- all of which are of course important and life-changing, I am sure there are a veritable smorgasbord of journalists out there whose job it is exclusively to cover that news, and I wouldn’t want to detract from their work as that would put me entirely to blame for the unemployment crisis. But I met someone recently who changed my life. And he is right up there with Ancient History on my mental list of What Matters.

Now every minute of every day billions of people in the world develop an emotional attachment to another human being caused by an increased level of oestrogen being released in the brain. Over time, this develops into a neurological condition and the brain releases an abundance of chemicals including pheromones, dopamine and serotonin. Romantic, right? This is how we love.
The theme of teen love is inescapable- we engage in the much-detested Twilight series for its fantastically positive depiction of this theme, even in Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet were only fourteen. Personal experience has taught me that while dabbling in this art you are unlikely to commit suicide or end up a vampire- Romeo and Juliet didn’t have BBM, after all- the physical agony and the burden of developing such a strong attachment to another human being is deeply disturbing. In all honesty, I didn’t realise I had the emotional capacity. And this matters.
Since the day this genuinely perfect teenage boy strolled into my life in his trench coat and skinny jeans I have, as a person, changed irreversibly and I cannot decide if I approve of this metamorphosis. This emotional state brings out both the best and the worst you can be, and I know a lot more about myself than I did when I started this process. Because now I understand What Matters to me.

It matters that our favourite films and books and musicals and breakfast cereals are the same. It matters that we both preferred Shrek 2 to Shrek 1 and that his favourite character and my favourite character from that programme that only we watch are the same. It matters that, because none of my friends would come with me, I went to The British Museum by myself to see the exhibition on the Ancient Greeks and found him doing the exact same thing. It mattered that we spent a day discussing the lifestyle of the Romans versus the Greeks over coffee and watched the DVD of Jesus Christ Superstar with blankets to play spot-the-historical-inaccuracy. That mattered to me.

You, you there, hi, you will have your own passions and things that matter. I’m aware that I’ve just spent however many words boring you with some of mine. But the thing that I wanted to say was: pursue that passion. Indulge it, relish it, delight in it (I am assuming it is something like geometry and not anything illegal). Understanding What Mattered to me made me a happier, warmer and better human being, just generally more of a goddess, and that has nothing to do with the fact that having the same things that matter in common brought me together with the aforementioned deific being. So, get out there, go, now- and indulge your passion. Because that is what truly matters