My New Life

I’ve been safe in the castle in my mind for a while now. In May I wrote about how one day I knew I would find my wings and flutter out of it’s all walls, but for the time being I was happy laid on the floor, sheltered from the potential chaos of the outside world.

I often wondered what was on the outside and what might be waiting for me, but my castle wasn’t like a club where I’d get my hand stamped to ensure I would be welcomed back in – if I left I couldn’t come back, and terrified me.

At one time the castle walls seemed to tower over me, only showing me the glorious blue sky above. So tall nothing could peek over at me, and I could never scale them to peek out either – but as I became strong, I became taller, and I outgrew my castle walls.

Now was the time to leave.

In preparation for leaving, I tried to control what was on the outside of the walls, as I tried to scrape together parts of my life from before I entered my castle. The biggest part of my life was studying counselling, and putting my own wants aside, I sent a desperate email to my university asking what was next for me.

Yearning for a sense of my old normality, I thought it was what I wanted until I received an email that read:

‘If you fill in the form attached, we can arrange when you want to come back and finish the course.’

I stared at the email and the attachment, but I couldn’t bring myself to even open the form. I wanted normality, and I wanted comfort – but this felt like neither. It was then I knew for certain it was over and I couldn’t go back.

That familiar feeling of being a square peg attempting to squeeze into a round hole was settling in my chest again. I never liked this feeling, so why am I putting myself through it again?

I allowed myself one final week to make my decision, and of course after that week my thoughts hadn’t changed, and so I wrote an email explaining my want to withdraw from the course.

Sat at my desk, I smiled and shouted all the things I wouldn’t miss about it. All the stress, the people I didn’t like, theories I hated, the deadlines, and that one lesson where we watched a documentary on asylums and I felt physically sick – it was all finished, over in one email, and so feeling completely liberated I clicked send, and let out a sigh of relief.

Of course, my email was met with advice suggesting I give myself ‘more time to think about it’, and so I told them sternly: I had plenty of time to think and this was my final decision.

For a week, I checked my email inbox everyday to find nothing new, until today.

‘The board have confirmed your withdrawal from the course’

My eyes became watery, and a lump appeared in my throat.

It’s finally over, and I can’t quite believe it.

I have left a lot of things in my life and I have struggled to stick with most things I’ve ever done in education. I left school at fourteen, I was kicked out of college at seventeen, I left a course in music halfway through at nineteen, and pretty-much got kicked out of another college at twenty, and then I found counselling.

It pains me to have left something again but the fact I did it at all makes me very proud. I completed three full courses of ‘Counselling Skills’, one full year of my foundation degree, and 90% of my second. I also passed my GCSE in Maths before beginning university because, for once, I didn’t want to have to lie my way onto another course. (Sometimes you have to tell a white lie or two to get where you want in life, don’t judge me!)

There are somethings in my past I wish I hadn’t left. I regret leaving the music course, and I wish I had finished school, but I know when I look back on my time studying counselling, I’m not going to get that feeling, because it’s all still in my mind and will forever be present in my daily life.

The things I learnt on the courses from the tutors, my books, my peers and my compulsory therapy, aren’t going to vanish from my mind simply because I don’t own a piece of paper with a Foundation Degree in Counselling and my name written on it – them things will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I am so proud of the person I’ve become through it all.

I always imagined fluttering out of my castle walls like a dainty butterfly, but I feel as if I’ve kind of burst out the castle door and took them off their giant hinges! If I had flown out the top it would have remained intact, but breaking the doors ensures I cannot come back to that part of my life. My castle served it’s purpose, but I have no need to ever return.

As the saying goes, as one door closes another opens, or in my case as one door hangs off it’s hinges, another will sit perfectly and will await my arrival.