Some people are brought up to aspire to do a job with not just a good income but a great income. Some people have to do that kind of a job out of necessity. Some don't even get the chance. Some...some just don't know.
Whilst I was growing up, I was taught about the importance of "meritocracy", work hard enough and you can achieve anything. My parents for the most part still hold this belief, they both became engineers through hard work and seizing all of the "right" opportunities, my mother especially had to rely on those which were externally provided due to her working class upbringing. She has always been some what of a role model to me simply because she has proved that if you put your mind to it, you really can achieve what you aspire to. That being said, she also believes that her career was chosen for her as she entered her profession through an apprenticeship. My stepdad on the other hand was especially gifted in maths and he essentially found engineering through looking at a prospectus and thinking "I'm interested in that and I could do that".
I have never been one to aspire to money, but I think that's because I was never taught to, I was taught to have dreams and aspire to whatever my heart's desire. This was enforced by my middle school RE/History teacher, who once stopped a lesson to talk about all of the jobs he had previously. He told us that the reason he'd worked his way through so many was that he was in the pursuit of happiness so he left a job whenever it became a drag. He spent so long looking for the spark that makes you feel excited to go to work or persist through difficult situations, that when he eventually found it in teaching he knew he would hold onto it for as long as he possibly could and this passion really shone through his teaching. He is up there with the best and most memorable teachers and his lessons really stuck with me. He taught me to aspire to true happiness rather than job security.
Throughout my time in education so far, I've been asked a heck of a lot about what I aspire to. In middle school I was the " shy art girl", the type of person people would come up to and say "can you draw me?" I became really interested in fashion and spent lots of time drawing up various designs for clothes. I experimented with my style and have been through many different phases of clothing styles, in middle school I was also a major anime geek and learned lots about various popular Japanese clothing movements. I tried "fairy kei", "Sweet Lolita" and some non Japanese clothing styles such as "emo" and "pastel goth".
My life completely changed in September year 11, when I was 16, suddenly my world crumbled and I had to face the idea that aspirations have to be realistic. I found Health and Social care too easy and got really bored with the subject yet I still believed that continuing to pursue drama therapy would re-spark my interest. Then, after an incident in PE, I fainted for the first time. Initially, it was thought to be due to poor eating habits and exhaustion, however it happened again and again and again. I was given medical leave for a week and the moment I returned to school, it kept happening again and again and again. I spent the best part of a month being told to "snap out of it" and "stop faking it", I did my best to explain that I couldn't control it but nobody really believed me until it became such a problem that I had to go to the doctor. There had to be an explanation. My doctor confirmed it wasn't eating or sleeping habits, although they were contributing to the severity of my anxiety, so a blood test led to a hospital referral, led to 48 hours in hospital having every check in existence, including blood pressure checks every few hours and a very painful heart ultrasound...and after all of that, they found nothing. I was asked if I felt stressed and I said "no" because I genuinely didn't, it was GCSE year and I felt confident in the fact that I started revision before practically anyone I knew. So I was sent home with no kind of diagnosis and no advice other than, this is just a phase, it should go in about 6 months. It didn't.
From that moment until after my exams, I endured a lot of hell from people who refused to see this as a problem I genuinely had no control over other than how I mentally handled it. Name calling: I endured it from students and teachers alike, cyberbullying: I tried to report it but nobody believed it. My school even tried to exclude me for having an illness, thank heck for my parents who explained "you wouldn't exclude someone for having a broken leg so why would you exclude someone for having a mental illness?" Thankfully, I was able to stay in school and even though I missed a few exams due to having "attacks" I still passed every single one of my GCSE's, except maths, averaging at around a B, with my highest grade being my Distinction* in Health and social care. I even passed my drama practical assessment in spite of having to attempt it twice due to an attack. I was also given a diagnosis that summer: NEAD.
My disorder has many names, PNES, NES and NEAD. I personally use NEAD, which stands for "Non-epileptic attacks disorder", it comes under the bracket of Functional Neurological Disorders (FND) and is a chronic disorder that hardly anyone knows about. Even the NHS doesn't fully recognise it yet. Before you ask, it isn't epilepsy. Even though it looks like epilepsy, it is pretty harmless, there is nothing physically wrong. Instead of having the "fight or flight" response, my body randomly goes into a "freeze" state meaning that I have a variety of responses...
- I can go into a completely unconscious state
- I can have fits
- My breathing can go really shallow or really rapid
- I can be semi-conscious
- My "attacks" can last for anytime from 5 minutes to 6 hours
- I can get up, be fine and re-lapse
- I can recover instantly or it can take ages for me to recover
- Sometimes I can go about my day as if nothing has happened, other times I'm completely exhausted and want to sleep the rest of the day away
- I'm usually not "with it" enough to be able to think for myself
- It can happen anywhere at any time
- There is no cure and no reliable way of making attacks shorter
When I got my diagnoses, I was given a thin information pack and was told to live my life as if nothing had happened. Literally the only advice I received was "continue as normal". What I wasn't told was how much would change. When I started college, I decided to keep pursing my dreams of becoming a drama therapist, since I struggled with GCSE drama, I decided to take BTEC drama as it was significantly more practical and thus my forte. I also took A-level English literature and language combined, A-level Early Modern History and, since I failed maths, I had to re-take my GCSE. Within 4 months of starting my BTEC drama course, I was no longer deemed "well enough" to stay on the course, this feeling was mutual between myself and my college teachers who were worried that I wouldn't be able to complete the course in spite of my passion and work. So I dropped drama, which simultaneously crushed my "drama therapist" dreams and a part of myself. Drama was a major part of my life for so many years and I loved it with every once of my being, it was a passion I had pursued for 13 years and I felt, and still feel, like I lost a part of myself.
Again, I had to find a new aspiration. One thing I haven't mentioned so far is that I have been a member of various creative writing clubs since middle school, I even wrote articles for both my middle school and college newspapers, and I always have a book on me. I spent most of my time in middle school and secondary school living in the library and I read whenever I get the chance. That being said, I majorly overlooked my passion for English for the longest time. As I got older, whilst my family kept their meritocratic ideals, to the extent that at 13 I was told that I was going to have to work hard and aspire to either pursue a degree or an apprenticeship. This meant that I had to pass my A-Levels if I wanted to achieve anything in life. They also started to increasingly put forward the idea that earning money is very, very important. This made it very awkward when I decided to put all career ideas on hold and focus on what degree I was going to enrol onto.
When I first told my family that I was thinking of doing an English degree, they struggled
to get their head around the idea. I was basically telling them that I wanted to do a humanities degree with absolutely no idea of what career I wanted at the end of it and with no guarantee of a career in the first place. I was advised to be more realistic and find something which would enable me to make money. Me, being the person that I am, did the exact opposite. Whilst I buckled down and focused the vast majority of my energy into being 10x better at my A-levels than I was at GCSE, I also put more effort into my once "hobby" now "passion"- creative writing.
What has any of this got to do with anything? Well, when I started performing, I started focusing on improving my creative writing craft, connecting with others who care about writing and sending my work into the world. This combined with my grades helped my family support my theoretical choice of degree and thus my potential career options.
Alongside this willingness to perform, I went through a bit of trial and error. I failed my maths re-take again, having gotten caught up in the algorithm and I started an EPQ but dropped out after 2 weeks because it was too much for me to manage.
Then I had to start the process of applying for university and it was a fun nightmare. Yes, looking at courses and universities were so much fun, but knuckling down and specifying my degree as well as where I wanted to apply felt impossible. When I had my end of year review, I told the teacher that I was thinking about entering the teacher profession and asked if I should give up creative writing for either a teaching degree or a solid literature degree. He told me something along the lines of "don't give up creative writing, you'd be wasting your time teaching", even so I asked him about how he became a teacher and at the end of the meeting, he advised me to do a joint degree or a degree which included literature and creative writing. I was so confused at the time but I came to realise that he was half right.
I enrolled onto a few summer schools in order to attempt to fix the problem (and because I'm that much of a geek that I love being in some form of education and hate the idea of leaving it) and I felt even more confused in spite of the glowing comments I received on the essays I produced. Heck, I switched a course on education for a humanities course and then chose to write a history essay instead of an English literature essay because I felt more inspired by an image of a 1960's sexist swimsuit advert than learning about a 16th century writer- none of this made any sense to me whatsoever.
That same summer, frustration with my failed 2nd attempt at my maths GCSE in combination with family history of dyslexia and dyscalculia led to me having a 4 hour straight literacy and numeracy assessment and a few weeks later, a diagnosis of dyscalculia. Whilst any kind of diagnosis brings up all sorts of emotions, I felt relieved that my lack of ability with maths wasn't to do with lack of effort or interest and it gave me a sense of direction as it reaffirmed that humanities based subjects would be (mostly) a good fit for me. It also led to me making the decision to take up an AS level in Sociology in my final year of A-levels.
My final decision about my degree came down to what could I not live without and what I couldn't imagine doing. In spite of how much I enjoyed sociology, I decided it was too number based for me to be able to handle it at degree level. I considered History briefly but then realised that I was happy researching it as a hobby. Ever since Drama was out of the picture, the only things I spent my time doing (other than studying) was essentially reading and writing. So I decided that I wanted to mostly read and applied to do English literature with creative writing at 5 universities. I was fortunate enough to have been given offers from everywhere I applied to and I made my final choices this year. I am beyond delighted with my degree choice, I am lucky enough to be fully supported in my pursuit and I wouldn't change my choice for the world.
Seemingly once you make a decision, that's it, but no. I am still frequently asked what I want to do and for the longest time ever I have had absolutely no idea. I'm aware that lots of the careers in this field are difficult to enter and I'm aware that specialising in one career means loosing opportunities in others. So I've found myself, more recently, wondering if there is such thing as a realistic aspiration? And I've been wondering if I've been wasting my time searching for an ideal that just doesn't exist. I think that it's okay to enter into something and be unaware of the outcome, simultaneously the unknown drives me absolutely mad.
- Amello
No comments:
Post a Comment