Lessons and updates. The future.
The update is that I collected my student card today!!! As I was standing in the queue, I had this feeling of dread developing and started to wonder whether I was going to drown in memories of past failures and health issues but as soon as I picked up my card, my heart SOARED and I thought “to the future now”!!!
A bit about past life lessons….
I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations and how, as somebody who is quite idealistic, this has always caused issues for me. When I started my Masters at UCD, I thought it was going to be some sort of magical time and I was going to become a new person instilled with strength and confidence and healed from all past wounds/disasters– I would go forth into the world reborn! But that is not what happened at all. Any self-confidence I had was annihilated between 2010 and 2014 while I was extremely ill. I was an utter wreck, destroyed, and I have spent the last ten plus years trying to rebuild myself and move on from it. I placed all my hopes and dreams in my experience at UCD in 2023/2024 and thought I was, for example, going to magically bond with classmates and teachers etc… What happened instead was that all my writing beliefs were completely shaken and turned upside down. What I learned instead was that no teacher was going to magically instill me with the confidence that I lacked. Consider also that the teachers you look up to and whose writing you revere might not even like you and whether they do or not is irrelevant to how you get on in your course. You cannot let it bother you.
Nobody was going to keep sweetly encouraging me and hold my hand or take anything sort of special interest – this wasn’t primary school after all. I believe I became a stronger and more independent writer during my time at UCD because my time there made me realise that it really was just up to me to turn things around and I was ashamed that at 40/41 it had taken me so long to realise this! Yes, I learned a great deal in classes and beyond but the work I did privately got me there. I pursued independent research. As a mature student and autistic woman, I knew friendships were probably never going to happen for me there (something I have long made peace with) and they didn’t, naturally, but nor was it the epic social disaster of my past college experiences. I did fulfil some undergraduate dreams – I got a student job in the library! I completed the UCD Advantage Award! I adore UCD. It is indeed, like all good universities, a place of dreams and futures and it does so much for mature students and disadvantaged students – if I ever win the lottery, the first thing I will do is fund scholarships there. It has my undying devotion and gratitude. I would love to do a PhD at UCD and I will always encourage other students to do the creative writing courses there but it was not the magical nirvana of education and well-being that I thought it would be. There is no such place. Teachers are humans not saints. It is not their job to transform you – not a revelation to most people but saying it for the young (or young at heart) dreamers out there. They will open worlds to you but you must step into those worlds by yourself and explore them on your own.
The second thing I want to write about is my experience of renewing past friendships. When I left college in 2013, I was on a mission to rescue and repair as much of my life as possible and I went about it in completely the wrong way. I reached out to old school friends, for example, and it took me about six months to realise that I needed to have more self-respect than that because it was clear that merely following me back on social media out of pity and nothing more was not what I needed in my life and that I deserved a lot more. I deserved people who really respected and valued me and wanted to understand me and what I was going through. It was merely a one way street. I was so naive. Sometimes friendships cannot be mended. I had always blamed myself and what happened to me for how all my friendships (if you could even call them that) had ended but I also think that I deserved a lot more kindness, compassion and understanding than I received from them back then.
It is also true that sometimes you are better off alone and need to take time and space to fix yourself and your life before you let other people back in. What I learned from all this was to never look back and keep moving forward. Something I was thinking a great deal about today. Stay in the present, look to the future.