Tag: education

What do you mean you can’t feel it?

What do you mean you can’t feel it?

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

When we think about physical disability, a lot of the time many of us conjure the mental image of a severely physically disabled person who’s permanently confined to a wheelchair, miserable, and in serious need of society’s help. And if you’ve read enough of my blogs, then hopefully you’ll understand why this way of thinking is immensely damaging to literally everyone – regardless of whether you’re disabled or not. But today, the assumption about disability that I want to focus on is the one we make about the relationship between physical disability and pain.

A lot of the time, whether we’re watching an episode of DIY SOS, or Children in Need, or Me Before You, many of us assume that if a person has mild to severe physical ailments, then they’re probably in a lot of pain because of it. You hear that I’ve got Spina Bifida, you see me walking down the street wearing callipers, or getting out of a car after putting a disabled badge on display, and you figure that I probably have to take medication and I experience pain in my feet. (Obviously, you might not think about it at all, but if you are thinking about it, then this is often where the brain goes). It’s not an unfair assumption, and I’m not offended whenever people ask me whether I’m in pain, but it always makes for a fun back-and-forth when I then say that actually, one of the reasons why I develop problems is because I don’t experience any pain in my feet.

This is normally how it goes:

*at some point in the conversation the fact that I’m disabled has cropped up*

Them: So is it really painful?

Me: No, I actually don’t have much sensation below the knee on either leg. I can feel the inside, but not the outside. And I can’t move any of my toes – except my big toes, but even then, not really.

Them: Woah, that must be weird. Nice that you can’t feel if you’ve stood on something, though.

Me: Umm…hahahha…not really…If I stand on something, then I’m not gunna feel it, so I’m just gunna keep walking on it until it gets wedged further into my foot. My shoe could be filling up with blood and I’m not gunna know until I take it off. Then I’ve also got really bad circulation, so that’s going to take ages to heal. So it’d be kind of helpful for me to be able to feel it because then I’d know to not walk. But I get what you mean hahaha, it does mean I can kind of ignore it if I have a problem.

*and, scene.*

Basically, my relationship with pain in my legs is love-hate. If I had pain, then we probably could’ve avoided most of my foot problems – let alone the COUNTLESS internal monologues of stress, trying to guess whether something’s kicking off in my shoe – but obviously, I also don’t hate that someone can stand on my foot and it’s all good. Plus, it does make for hilarious stories, like how one time a guy told me he’d been playing footsie with me under the table for a literal hour and I’d had absolutely no clue…Or how every time somebody apologies profusely for standing on me, or accidentally kicking my foot, I tell them they can do it again if they want; it doesn’t bother me. Or that time that I didn’t know my friend’s house had underfloor heating until I fell over.

If there’s one thing that I’m trying to do on these online pages when I talk about disability, it’s to show you that that word is used to describe an infinite amount of variations of the human body. We use it when we deem something to have ‘gone wrong’, and in viewing it negatively, we always assume the worst. And I’m not saying that disability doesn’t come with problems – of course it does. There are disabled people who experience huge amounts of physical pain, who have to take loads of medication, or who are reliant on someone else to help them complete the most basic of tasks, but that isn’t all their lives are, nor is every assumption of what a disability is relevant to every disabled person.

But I’m not bringing this up to incite the ‘omg I hate people, why is everyone so closed-minded with their understanding of disability?’ response. Honestly, as you can see in the generalised example I gave before, I have a laugh with pretty much every person who asks me about how much pain I experience.

The fact is, society has a super problematic understanding of, and approach toward disability, but to sort that out, we’ve got to have conversations where it’s comfortable enough for somebody to get it wrong, then learn why without being humiliated or villainised for not knowing something that they have no direct experience of. As the person who’s being stereotyped, and treated a certain way because of lame assumptions, that can be difficult sometimes – understatement of the year. But you’d hope that by staying patient, and explaining it this time, the next time that that person comes across somebody with a disability, they’ll be better equipped to ask questions rather than make assumptions.

You’d hope.

Grind don’t stop

Grind don’t stop

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

What have I been thinking recently?

Not a whole lot if I’m honest. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. Pretending the sun is way warmer than it actually is. I went oUt oUt on Thursday; that was exciting. I watched The Little Mermaid yesterday.

I’ve been kind of tired.

We’re in the very last stretch of the university year and intellectually, I’m exhausted. I’m not walking around like a zombie, sleeping 15 hours a day – though I do generally need 9-10 hours of sleep a day to function, but that’s besides the point. I’ve been having a great time over the last couple of weeks, seeing and spending time with my friends and family and getting excited about restrictions easing. But during all the laughs there’s still this constant nagging in my head reminding me that I’ve got work and deadlines, and it’s making me really tired.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy my degree, because I honestly do find researching and writing essays, and speaking foreign languages incredibly fun. But this last academic year has been so taxing and I’m just bored of looking at screens. I don’t want to have to open up my laptop and sit for at least 5 hours a day doing vocabulary, or grammar exercises, or researching and writing essays. I look at the blank digital pages where my 2,500-word essay should be and though I’ve never struggled to have opinions, I feel like I have nothing worthwhile to say anymore. So I avoid it, but that only makes the process longer.

It’s just that the sun’s coming out, and restrictions are finally lifting after the most stressful year of pretty much everyone’s lives, but those deadlines still beckon. (!!) And I know that it might sound like I’m complaining about nothing but my friends and I have had a year of online university-learning and it’s been really hard. Just last term, we would each walk around the house letting out short screams or hysterical laughter or mantras of ‘can’t be arsed, can’t be arsed, can’t be arsed, I can do it, I can do it, don’t wanna do it, have to do it, gunna do it’ from the kitchen all the way back to our laptops, on our desks, in our rooms. And whilst it was always kind of funny to hear who was ‘losing it’ today, the stress and lack of motivation have been rEAl this year.

Nonetheless, even though we’re all burnt the fuck out, there’s really not that long left now: last push and then we can spend a day not studying, without feeling guilty about it or reaping the consequences the next time we sit down at our desks.

So, back to the laptop screens we go, but just for a few more weeks this time kids. Deep breaths.

Xx

I’ve changed my mind

I’ve changed my mind

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to do something brainy when I grew up. (This was obviously briefly interrupted by the oh-my-god-when-I’m-16-I’ll-go-on-The-X-Factor-moment, but then we don’t really need to give 7 year old me that much attention here…) I always knew that I was good at academia, and that I’d probably go to university and end up being a professional nerd. But as I’ve gone through the education system and I’ve learnt to hold my own as a young woman, I realise that I’ve been listening to those good old societal constructs again in telling myself that a profession determines my level of intelligence.

But before I go on to my potentially sickening motivational speech where I tell you to fOlLoW yOuR dReAms and dO wHaT yOu lOve, I’ve got to first acknowledge how successful we are at convincing ourselves, and our children that we need to know exactly how our life is going to play out from the first time someone asks us what we’re going to do after school. And it’s not that I think we should stop asking children these questions, it’s only that we take their answers way too seriously. We categorise careers and people according to what subjects they were good at at school, or their ability to write an essay, or to solve an equation. Yes, certain jobs require a level of academic ability for you to succeed, but intelligence isn’t limited to your academic success.

Before I started my degree, I was convinced I knew exactly what job I wanted to go into. I thought I was going to come out of Durham University and somehow weasel my way into a job in translation in the music industry – don’t ask me how I expected to get there, but that’s what I wanted to do. However, I’ve come to realise that I don’t want language to be the overriding aspect of my future career. Don’t get me wrong, I love languages, and I hope to continue learning new ones for the rest of my life. But I realise that I’m 21, and what I love doing more than anything right now, is writing these blogs, making my podcasts, and interviewing musicians on the radio.

So even though it’s not a ‘conventional’ choice, or something the education system taught me exactly how to get into, it’s something that I have a real passion for, and without indulging in my ego too much, it’s something that I know I could be really good at. Oh, and it’s kind of ideal for the whole physical disability situation because standing for long periods of time or walking long distances isn’t really a problem when all you have to do is sit behind a microphone or a laptop…so you know, it’s kind of a medical choice? But I digress.

I might only be really young, but my age is my power, because I truly can decide to do whatever I want to do with my life. Maybe I’ll get it completely wrong, but if I do then at least I tried! Plus, if it does all go tits up, then I’ll always have that cheeky Durham University degree in Japanese Studies with a bit of history, history of art, and Korean thrown in for extra spice on the CV.

So f*** it, let’s give it a go.

Let’s talk about sex, bby

Let’s talk about sex, bby

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Talking about sex in a super honest way is rarely done, because if you bring it up, a lot of the time people start to feel nervous, uncomfortable, anxious, self-conscious, etc, etc. And these reactions make perfect sense: sex is one of the most intimate things you can do with another person. However, it’s also nothing to be afraid of, so we should probably start getting more aware of how sex-positive we really are.

Sex-positivity, in the way I understand it, is the recognition and acceptance that sex is a totally normal part of a person’s life. It’s something most of us do, and society should normalise talking about it; especially in the sense that it should be enjoyable for everyone involved.

That sounds pretty simple, right? If you’re sexually active, then you should be enjoying it, and comfortable enough around your friends/family/sexual partner/s to talk about it. But unfortunately, sex-positivity isn’t practised by society as much as it should be.

For women, the idea of sex is both empowering and oppressive. We can take our sexuality into our own hands and decide who we want to sleep with and when, but whilst we’re empowering ourselves and our female friends, there always comes a point when you wonder whether doing this is making you seem like a bit of a slut to the wider world. And nobody wants to be a slut: that kind of reputation rarely ends well.

So we use the word with each other. And by trying to reclaim the term, women are somewhat able to fight against society telling us how much sex we should be having, because after all, my sex life is nobody’s business but my own.

This attitude, however, doesn’t mean that sex-positive women aren’t self-conscious, nervous or conflicted when it comes to sex. You might be totally fine with the concept of a one night stand, but then when you have one, thousands of years of female sexual oppression might start creeping into your head to tell you that you’re a slut and you’re making a fool of yourself. It happens; sexism’s a bitch.

Generally speaking though, sex should never be a thing that’s only appropriate for each gender to speak about amongst themselves. At school, I never saw how it made sense to separate the boys and the girls for the sex education talks. I obviously need to know the details of what’s going to happen with my body, but there’s a whole other half of the population that I’m actively not being told about. So when I develop relationships with that gender, there’s this huge barrier between us already, and I don’t see how that’s helpful.

Sex encompasses so many ideas and emotions that are vital to our relationships with ourselves and each other – regardless of gender. Politics, history, science, philosophy, psychology, anthropology: you name it, talking about sex would probably make parts of it make more sense. But aside from all that nerdy stuff, sex is fun, so why not talk about it in the same way you talk about all the other things you enjoy? That way, when it isn’t fun, you’ll feel comfortable enough around someone to tell them why.

Sex education

Sex education

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This week I’m on my period. So for the past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing painful cramps, mood sWINgs, and a whole lot of bleeding. Too much information? Well tough.

Even though I have my period once a month, and it’s an entirely healthy part of my life, society encourages me to never talk about it. Then a direct consequence of this, is that women generally know very little about how their bodies work, and how to take care of them. And the men around them know even less. So no one knows anything, and half of the population’s physical and mental health is put at risk.

Not ideal.

But I’m not talking about everyone being able to regurgitate the facts they learnt in science – although you should be able to do that. This is about acknowledging the hormones and the pain women feel whilst on their periods as legitimate. We’re not overreacting: it f**king hurts. And as funny as it might be to see a girl cry over her bobble snapping, those hormones do genuinely mESS you up for a couple of days. I mean, sometimes we literally wake up in a pool of our own blood.

So, periods are intense and tedious enough: I don’t need society telling me that I should be embarrassed by them too. Nor do I need people to tell me how/what I should feel/wear/say/think when no one is taking an interest in my body or me anyway.

At the same time, I don’t know much about what male bodies go through. I know they don’t have such a dramatic time of it every month, but that doesn’t mean it’s always smooth-sailing. Like puberty, that doesn’t sound like a walk in the park for a boy – physically, or psychologically.

The point is that we never ask detailed, comprehensive questions about our bodies. But we go further than not asking: we stigmatise the topics so much so that it becomes ‘gross’ or ‘uncomfortable’ to even think about going there at all.

For women especially, getting to know yourself intimately isn’t normalised, so a lot of us just don’t do it – by ‘intimately’, I mean both sexually and biologically. A lot of my female friends have never even taken a mirror to have a look at themselves, let alone experiment with masturbation. Whereas a huge proportion of my male friends know their genitals as well as any other part of their body – maybe even better.

So if we’re saying that women barely know anything about their own bodies, and we then take that to talk about health and safety, how could we ever know that something is wrong, if we don’t know what we look like when we’re healthy? Then on a psychological level, how is it right that we’re so disgusted by our own bodies? We won’t touch or get to know ourselves but we’ll let some random lad who might ditch us next week do whatever he wants? I dOn’T tHiNk sO.

Conversations about our bodies shouldn’t be separated according to whatever genitals you were born with, because we don’t exclusively socialise with people of the same sex. We need to ditch the euphemisms and the pressure, so we can learn to look after each other and ourselves more effectively. After all, knowing this information will definitely save someone’s life one day – maybe even your own.

Get woke

Get woke

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The last 8 months have drastically altered the way the world works. By being forced to stay indoors for weeks – in some countries, months – on end, we’ve been thrust into personal isolation in a way we’ve never experienced. In the future, some will probably only talk about how they were really bored, unable to go on holiday, or gained an unhealthy obsession with TikTok during this time (guilty…). Whilst others will have worse tales to tell.

Overall however, there seems to have been an increase in how much the general public pay attention to the news. It’s an unsurprising change, given we had very little else to do…but even though people started watching the news more, it seems we still struggle to fully engage with what we’re hearing.

When we go through school, there are often moments in our classrooms when we’re encouraged to discuss the politics relating to whatever we’re studying: whether that’s how the social climate of 1920’s America influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or whether it’s answering the million-dollar question: why did Henry VIII have so many wives? However, a lot of the time our curriculum doesn’t actually encourage us to really think about the topics, and then relate what we learn to our society today. We learn phrases we know ‘the examiner wants to hear’, but we’re 15, so why would we need to care about these things outside of the classroom?

But then we come into the world and we’re completely unprepared to understand everything that’s going on. Only we’re not completely unprepared: it’s just that we’re rarely taught how to recognise that what we learnt about the Tudors, the Bolsheviks, or the Ancient Romans is relevant to us now. Furthermore, people think they don’t have access to politics because they don’t know the lingo. But politicians complicate things on purpose; they’re trying to make you think that you don’t get it because then you’ll leave them to it.

Plus as humans, we separate ourselves from our history and assume that because we weren’t there, we don’t need to give it that much attention. And our learning at school is for exams, it’s rarely for the sake of knowing. But trust me, you’d probably recognise a lot of the ideas and political tactics kicking about now, from your history lessons if you took a second to think about it. After all, humans can be amazingly innovative but we also have a habit of ignoring our past, then repeating it because we’ve ‘forgotten’ about it.

So I couldn’t care less about how many news articles you share on your social media: it’s your profile, do what you want. What I do care about though, is people asking questions and actively learning about the world they live in. We’re the next cohort of citizens and we’re inheriting a big, phat, stinking mess. I mean, the planet is literally dying…

You learnt so much about how the world works today from school and everything you’ve ever read. It’s not irrelevant and it’s not always ‘boring/depressing’: educate yourself about the positive/exciting parts of world history too. But there’s so much to be said for paying serious attention to humanity’s past mistakes, learning from them, and finally doing something else.

I listened to a podcast the other day that said around 22% of American millennials don’t even KNOW what the Holocaust was. And that’s terrifying. So please please please exit Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for a couple of hours today and read a book, watch a documentary, listen to a podcast, read an article – I don’t care, just learn something new.

Discrimination is surprising

Discrimination is surprising

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

The response to last week’s blog has been amazing: people were completely outraged! And this was so weird (lovely !!, but weird) to me, because my getting blocked by students at my University didn’t even make me that angry: it wasn’t an unprecedented event. But you were all so shocked and furious! So, I realise, that you have no idea of just how poorly your disabled community is treated…

So let’s actually talk about disability and society, and let’s first take the idea of ‘looking’ disabled. Well, I don’t ‘look’ disabled. But the fact that I don’t has had serious consequences on the way society treats me.

There are two instances from Secondary School relating to this which particularly stand out for me. The first was when I was in Year 7: I was 11 years old and I’d recently developed a blister on my foot from walking too much, or having a fold in my sock, or something else tedious. (Yes, folds in socks can shove me in a wheelchair for months: it’s that stupid.) So in an attempt to avoid going into my wheelchair, I started to use the lift for disabled students to cut down my walking.

I was outside the lift one afternoon on the way to my next lesson with my best friend when my Deputy Headteacher came over and asked me what I was doing. I politely explained how I had a note from my parents, that I had a blister and that I had to use the lift. She didn’t look at my note, and she wasn’t interested when I started to lift my trousers so she could see my shoes. Instead, she yelled at me saying ‘a blister?! I’ve never heard such a thing! You’re stopping disabled students from using this lift!’. So I went to lesson in floods of tears: completely humiliated.

In this moment I didn’t ‘look disabled’ to my Deputy Headteacher: I didn’t have a noticeable body deformity, sound disabled, nor was I in a wheelchair. Flash-forward 2 weeks however, and I was in a wheelchair…no challenges as to why I was using the lift then…

The other memory I have is from being in Year 10 – the 3rd time I was in a wheelchair at Secondary School. My friends were pushing me through the halls to our lesson, and a student I didn’t know saw us. He shouted ‘piss off! I saw you walking last week, get out of that thing!’ at me across the hallway. I was stunned but my friends shouted back at him and we kept moving. Clearly, to this boy I was a liar; I was the person the media and government demonise as ‘abusing disability services and benefits’, and he took this moment to publicly expose my lie.

…

The world is constantly fed this finite version of what it is to be disabled: what it looks like, what it sounds like and what it feels like. But nobody ever takes the time to work out whether this stereotype is true. So just think about how many people you know without a disability: are they all the same? Do they all have the same bodies and personalities and emotions and ideas? Now think about applying that to disabled people. Do we all have the same disabilities? Do people who even fall under the same type of disability, have the same variation of that disability? Do we all look the same? Sound the same? Feel the same?

The answer is clearly ‘no’. Still, we’re grouped into one blob and are treated poorly by people and institutions who take very little time to try and actually understand us.

I’ve never been bullied directly because I’ve always had people standing up for me, and I’ve always had the confidence to stand up for myself. But I’ll always be vulnerable to discrimination by institutions and the general public because of an unwillingness of people to sit down and actually learn about things they know nothing about.

If you’re outraged by my experiences then start learning about other people’s, because I’m such a privileged white girl and my exposure to discrimination is nowhere near as bad as it gets. Trust me, you know more disabled people than you think, and you have more preconceptions about disability than you recognise.

Lol, I got blocked

Lol, I got blocked

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

When I first started this blog, I didn’t really think that anyone would read it. Then after a few months I realised that hundreds of people every week were clicking on my links. (!) And I thought that if I promoted it on social media, then maybe even more strangers would take the time to read what I write.

One of the ways I did this was by occasionally sharing posts to my University’s ‘overheard’ page. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s basically a Facebook page run by students of universities where the members share all kinds of things: information about houses, people trying to find things they lost on nights out, promotion of student events or student projects, all sorts. And when I shared blogs to this page, I received hundreds of reads on each article (one time, the views even reached over 1000 in 24 hours), with strangers sending me messages saying how much they’d appreciated my writing. Some even said ‘thank you’.

However, whilst many were grateful to me for talking about subjects such as social class at Durham University, others reported me as promoting a scam…This then caused me to get blocked from the page – a fact I only realised when I checked and saw that I could no longer access the student community.

Bit harsh, but never-mind, whatever.

When I asked the administrator of the page to unblock me, they did it straight away. Then last Wednesday I shared a blog about disability representation. I did so because disability is really not something I ever hear mentioned at Durham, and I thought that reading a blog about it might be a safe and easy way to get students in on the discussion. Plus, I thought, if you don’t want to read it, then just scroll, it’s not exactly an offending topic???

I received hundreds of reads and around 50 likes on that post. But once again, some found it so insulting that they chose to report it, and got me blocked. Only this time when I asked the administrator if they could undo it, they said they couldn’t because at least 50 students reported the post. At least 50 !!! The administrator didn’t remove or report it, my fellow students did.

Why am I even writing about this, you ask? Well, I’m writing about it because when I shared blogs about dating or relationships, they stayed up on the page for weeks – no problem. But then when I discussed social class or disability, at least 100 people took the time and effort to report me. So this isn’t about my ego, it’s about how objectively insane it is that at least 100 students at my university have reported articles about social class and disability as having no place on a Facebook page devoted to a student community. These people may make up a minority, but they exist, and they’re actively rejecting conversations about disability and social class, and I’m not okay with it.

Durham is one of the best universities in the country and many of those attending it will reach powerful positions in their lives; some will even become the people who make the rules in this country. So if later down the line these people are going to control my rights as a disabled person, then why can’t I ask them to try and understand what it’s actually like to be the disabled person?

If you don’t like my writing then it’s calm, just keep scrolling. But don’t tell me to sit down and shut up, or get me blocked because I’m not talking about something you want to hear: it’ll only make me more persistent.

I want to go for a walk

I want to go for a walk

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 2 Comments

For me, disability causes a constant conflict between personality and body. Ever since I was small I’ve struggled to mesh the two together because I’ve never wanted to accept that there are things that I’ll never be able to do. From the age of about 8 until 14 I was awful for it: I’d just do everything that my friends were doing because I wanted to, and I’d rarely give a second thought to my feet. But then I’d end up with infections, and in a wheelchair. So living that way didn’t get me very far.

After about the age of 16 I’d managed to (sort of) make my peace with it. I accepted that I couldn’t ever live my life the way most people could, and I mourned it, but ultimately I realised that those are just the cards I’ve been dealt. I mean, my disability could be so much worse, and what do I gain from fighting it?

Then I was 19 and I had my gap year. I proved to myself that I could travel the world on my own: I went to seriously remote places, away from medical institutions, and showed myself that doing what I want to do doesn’t always have to end in infection and debilitation. It might sound trivial to you, but it was breaking news to me, my family and my doctors.

This year, quarantine happened and after a while the government started allowing people out for walks and exercise. This change to the lockdown brought so much relief to most people, but not to me because I can’t just go out for a run. I can’t just walk down loads of steps to the beach and then back up them, because if I do, I have to accept that I might injure myself. I might put myself in a wheelchair.

This is where we get back to how complicated disability is, because many of my readers have seen me in person and have seen me walk plenty of times. I can walk short distances, and I’ve been known to dance for hours on a night out, but sometimes it’s just luck that I don’t end up with a blister after doing these things. I’m a seasoned professional when it comes to internalising my worries and pushing my disability as far as it can go. I’m stubborn and I’m young, and I don’t see why all my friends can but I can’t. Like I said, it’s a constant conflict.

But I don’t write these blogs to be all ‘woe is me’. Loads of people have it so much worse than I do, and everyone does the best with what they’ve got. It’s just that if I’m going to write blogs about when I feel empowered by being a young disabled woman, then I have to show you the side of my condition which gives me no joy whatsoever.

Some days I just don’t want to be this disabled person. It makes me feel weak and suffocated. I don’t want to have to think about whether I can go somewhere, I want to be able to just go. Sometimes I look at my feet and wonder how it’s fair that I have to be the only person I know who can’t just wear normal shoes and have normal legs. I wonder how it’s fair that I’ll have this for the rest of my life, and how I’m supposed to get over it when there’s nothing I, or anyone else can do to ever improve it.

There are no solutions to these problems. Life doesn’t work in ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ – especially when I don’t believe in any type of God. As far as I can see, random people get random sacks of sh** to deal with, and we move. I have a really good time even with the headache of my Spina Bifida, and it’s shaped me in so many positive ways. To be honest, if someone told me that I could flick a switch to get rid of it I’m not even sure that I would. Disability can enrich a person’s perspective on the world and life in many ways, but I’d never, ever, wish it on anyone.

Exam season is gross and degrees are difficult

Exam season is gross and degrees are difficult

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 3 Comments

My experience of University so far has been a mixed bag. Luckily, the overriding emotions are positive, but there are also elements that I really don’t love that much.

Last Thursday I cried when I read some feedback given to me by my language teacher about a practice paper I’d spent hours on. I’d done the paper the first time, received the marks and was disappointed. So, I spent around 8 hours this week translating every word of Japanese on it with my textbooks and notes. Then I redid my answers and rewrote the essay because I wanted to make sure that I knew how to do better. So I cried at the second lot of feedback my teacher gave me because after all of that time and effort, it was better but it still wasn’t right.

Oh and don’t think that I don’t know how pathetic it is that I do that hahahah. Trust me, I’m aware.

I know I have issues with being a perfectionist: I’m way too hard on myself when I don’t understand things straight away. I definitely need to try and ease up when it comes to my work ethic. But I don’t cry because of my ego, I cry because I want to love my degree and because I try really hard to improve. Plus, it didn’t help that at school we’re absolutely overwhelmed with feedback sheets. Whether it was a bullet point list, or ‘two ticks and a target’ in green pen, we were always given the correct and very specific direction. I hated the whole peer marking thing at the time, and now I’m realising just how much it made the work easier.

I absolutely don’t want to be spoon-fed answers. It just comes as a bit of a nasty shock when all of a sudden I’ve gone from thinking I was pretty decent at languages, to thinking that I’d chosen the wrong degree. I won’t change my degree because I don’t want to, and I did kind of throw myself in at the deep end with Japanese…so it’s sort of on me.

But the level of difficulty in my degree this year has made me feel stupid on many occasions. I don’t mean the ‘omg lol I’m so dumb’ jokey version of stupid, I mean straight-up ‘I’m actually just not clever’. And it might sound like a totally woe is me, first world problems lamentation but feeling that way for the first time is really awful. There have been plenty of things I’ve not been good at in my life but I’ve always liked to think that at least I’m clever. So when I’ve been thrust into situations where I really doubted that, naturally, I get upset about it.

University is meant to be really challenging, because if it weren’t then there would be little point in attending. So I recognise that I’ve got some catching up to do and I just have to keep reminding myself that even though I’m not doing as well as I’d like to, I know I couldn’t be working any harder. I’m not stupid, and eventually I’m going to be good at this language; just not yet.

So I’d like to finish by wishing all of the students reading this: good luck in your online exams!! Also, you’re not stupid if you’ve found this first year really difficult – specific shout-out to my fellow Durham students. And finally, thank you for using my blog as one of your many methods of procrastination. I’m honoured x