I ’m in university now, in the final year of my BA in fine art, and I’ve been a full-time student for five weeks.
Are you loving it, everyone asks; are you excited; what have you painted? And I feel like one of those old memes: How It Started v How It’s Going.
It started with sharpened pencils, packed sandwiches and a thrill of anticipation.
I turned up fresh and early for the first morning of what I always wanted to do, for the first day of the rest of my life.
They didn’t know who I was. The Bright Young Things gawped, the lecturer couldn’t find me on his list and the department head was duly called.
He was incredulous: was I meant to be here? Um… All studio spaces had already been allocated, they said, so they shoehorned me into a corner under a low glass roof offering blazing sunlight or deep shadow depending on the weather, and it drizzled through the window that wouldn’t shut above me, and I tried not to cry.
Determined, I took my brandnew diary to the notice board and listed all my lectures – as well as some that turned out not to be mine because how was I to know the difference?
At our first meeting, I sat lonely as a leper and, of course, I wasn’t on the class register. Was I meant to be there? I wrote my name in at the bottom.
Everyone else seemed to know what was going on, where we had to be and what we were meant to be doing.
The Bright Young Things began working to a brief that seemed to be written in the ether; I drew a few sketches of my lunch.
It took four days to figure out that they were all on an online education system that nobody had told me about.
“That’s because I haven’t got your student e-mail,” sniped the department head, as if me being a black hole in his admin was my fault. “Give me yours and I’ll send you a reminder after class,” I said coolly, while I boiled inside.
Am I meant to be here? The imposter syndrome is huge. I wake up anxious at 4am after dreams I’m dragging famous paintings along dirty floors.
However, they’ve fixed my window, they’ve installed a light and I’m on their lists. I’m really here. And I’m getting there.
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