Thoughts of a foundation student

This year I made the decision to join the Foundation Creative Writing course. To some, starting a foundation course while I am taking a break from my postgraduate studies may seem odd. I am doing a course three levels lower than my previous course. Normally people progress onto higher levels… whether that be by doing a more advanced qualification or moving up into a senior position in the workplace. 

The idea that I am going in the wrong direction plays on my mind a lot. I love writing, and I think all qualifications and vocations are valid, so why am I self-conscious about being seen as less experienced than I used to be?

This was a question I asked myself as I was writing a guest blog post for a mental health charity. My idea was to write about how studying at Open College of the Arts helped me come to terms with mental health difficulties I was experiencing.

The title of the post was going to be Managing my OCD at the OCA. I just wanted to mention it here because I thought the title was punchy, and I was proud of it. I never submitted my article to the charity because I did not feel ready to publish so much detail about my mental health. But writing flicked a switch in my head.

Writing gave me purpose.

The day I drafted the article I felt inspired, ideas flowed through me and I was able to recall life events that shaped me. I had not enjoyed writing this much for the best part of a decade. I wrote about the excitement when I first got paid for writing, my feelings of not being good at poetry in school because I did not like rhyming, and the constant battle between getting paid well and doing work that makes me happy. Ultimately, writing had given me a space to process all my conflicting emotions as I sat at home recovering from my latest hospital admission.

As the fog of the previous few months lifted, writing helped me interrogate the beliefs I held about myself. Writing helped me identify where my intrusive thoughts stemmed from and why I was holding on to them.

When I started the course, one of the induction activities was to reflect on my motivations. Instantly I found I was reverting to my old ways of thinking, and I felt like I needed to have some sort of lofty goal (to become a professional writer, or to form the basis of a future creative writing research proposal). As I tapped backspace, I took a breath, and wrote “Writing saved my life”.