Tripped Up

I seem to have a habit of unconsciously attaching huge psychological significance to relatively little things.  They really mean something to me, connecting in my head into a huge defining structure that helps me make sense of who and where I am and how I feel.

Often I don’t even realise how important something is, or how deep it goes until it really affects me, or if it’s taken away, and then I find myself watching my entire inner world cave in on itself. It’s ridiculous really, but human. After all, it’s where we find our security, in these constructed houses of ideas and plans and dreams and relationships and routines. And can only take a bit of mental woodworm, or old dark water still lingering in the basement, or a brick that comes loose, to bring it all tumbling round around us.

So Kai struggling to settle into nursery becomes tied up with guilt over my marriage ending, and one closed door suddenly represents every other closed door and everything I have ever lost.

Today I went to pay for my life drawing evening class that started tonight. I had been told I had a place, had been sent and filled in my forms, but when I arrived at the college this morning I find out that due to an ‘administrative error’ the class is actually full and I can’t attend. They’re extremely apologetic but there’s nothing they can do, they’re heavily restricted to class sizes and there simply isn’t a place. Funding has been cut so there are few alternative classes, not one within a distance I can travel or within a time I can get a babysitter for Kai.

I am devastated. I haven’t had an easy journey with my artistic ‘talents’ and last year made the big decision to enrol in art school full time to finally give myself a chance to explore that side to myself. I was so excited, full of the possibilities it might open up and the chance for self-expression. But just before the course started, in the midst of my marriage falling apart around my ears and my husband losing his job and moving out, I had to abandon my place. Kai would have had to start going to nursery every day, which in the midst of so much change seemed too much and too cruel, and I was suddenly faced with having to be financially independent and couldn’t survive on a student bursary.

It was a big loss, in the middle of a lot of bigger losses. And it wasn’t the first time I had had to let go of a big dream like that. Years before I had had to give up another place at university when I got so ill, something that took me a long, long time to get over.

If you’ve read this post, which I know a great number of people did, 2000 over a couple of days, you will know I’ve been having a good stab at picking myself back up again after the heartache of last year, and my art class felt significant. It represented an evening out, a chance to meet new people, to try and make myself come out of the self-protective hedgehog ball I so easily revert to these days. It represented reclaiming a bit of the dream I lost last year. It represented being brave and looking down the barrel of self-doubt and low confidence.

And it’s been taken away. Just like that.

I know it is just one course, not the end of the world. Something else will come up, a new door will open, I WILL get back up again.

But it meant a lot to me, and I’m upset today.

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