Its a habit that over the next few hours I am going to have to kick. I have so much to do and yet my brain hasn't seemed to notice. No matter how many to-do lists I stick around and no matter how many deadlines I scare myself with I just can't seem to gather together the necessary brain cells required to carry out the simplest of tasks.
I remember a time, long before University when I used to just sit at a computer for hours and just write. Whatever came into my head, articles, stories even scripts sometimes. This creative flair that I have always prided myself on has just gone.
It was my 'thing'. I could just knock out an amazing stories, bring my mother to tears with my powerful and beautiful words and I relished that. The way it was possible to make someone feel something so strongly with words and images that have come purely and organically from my own head. I then made the fatal decision to come to University.
I thought that getting a degree would give me some kind of recognition, that this talent that I had was somehow worthless to the world without a piece of paper that said 'YES, Emma-Jane Allen can write things that people will want to read.'
I have since found that University has done entirely the opposite. Instead of opening up a world that I was longing to enter, instead of enabling me to make a career out of what I see as my only true talent, it has made me really dislike it.
Its stripped all the passion and creativity I had and replaced it with resent and referencing. Over the past 2 and a half years I have slowly but surely given up on any dreams I had of becoming a successful writer, I have been crushed by assignment after assignment in which I have had little to no opportunity to display my creative skill. These assignments have, in turn taken up so much of my time that any extra curricular work that I might have produced has been squashed to one side.
I did know before I started university that it would be hard work and I'm not a person who is afraid of hard work. I was fully prepared to be staying up all night writing assignments and making them just right. What I wasn't prepared for however was the lack of creativity in an institute that apparently prides itself on extracting the full potential of all its students.
I also don't want you to think that this is simply a product of a girl who is failing because I'm not, in fact, I'm doing really rather well just not in the way I really wanted to be.
This is why I am now totally convinced that University is the worst route to take if you're interested in the creative industry. If you have a talent, a real talent, then work at it. Build your portfolio, send your work out to industry professionals and don't listen to the people that will tell you that you'll never get a decent job without a degree because if you work hard enough and you have a talent then there truly is no qualification on this planet that could give you better tools than you already have...your own creative brain.
I am slightly bitter, but only because it's taken me this long and thousands of £'s of debt to realise what was pretty obvious to begin with.
