for-the-love-of-a-blog - Tumblr blog

[for-the-love-of-a-blog]

A music graduates story.

It’s very unlikely ANYONE will ever see this and certainly not the people who need to see it. I am just at a stage in my life where this ball of hell that’s inplemented itself into my stomach needs to get some relief after the last 4 years. So, in attempts to atleast hide my own identity I will call myself James.

Hi! I’m James, I’m 22, a music graduate and someone who struggles with mental health issues and have done for the last few years. If anyone reading this thinks, ugh here we go another sob story. I guess you could view it as that but I am using this to get out some of pain that is in my system that I need to get out.

I guess we can start at around 2015. A very over enthusiastic musician, looking to go off to a college of music and study how to get into the career of a classical musician. I spent the few years prior working hard both as a musician as well as a stage hand and a few other bits to try and make sure that I had a well rounded experience of the arts industry for my future. Well, it got to university sign up time and I sent out a few applications and got some auditions. FYI, I’m not a very good academic person and did enough to get by so getting an audition based off my perfomance and how I played was just what I needed. So, one thing leads to another and I get a place. I’ve never been so happy in my life at this point, I was just so elated to have some kind of congratulations for the hard work I had put in up to this point. I worked for the remainder of the year, through my exams and anxiously awaited my results day. I got in, I watched my friends do the same and some not get what they wanted. It was an incredibly sobering moment, I had done what I spent so many years working to do. I was finally going to study to become the Orchestral musician I always wanted to be. It was the culmination of the last 10 years for me. Everything came down to this and I couldn’t have been happier. At least, I thought that was where my life was going,

Starting college (My university was technically called a college so I refer to it as such) all alone was terrifying, I got there and walked through the door to a room full of people already friends.... Little did I know that starting the year in dorms was the best thing to do and me staying at home didn’t do much for me socially. I shook it off at the time, tried my best to make friends and talk to people. It wasn’t easy but I seemed to do okay, slowly making friends and kinda talking to a few people. However, it also showed that I was the complete outsider. I didn’t fit in, there was a culture there that no matter how I tried to work with. I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t a good start, the next few weeks was a getting to know you portion of the course and for a bit of context I am not a drinker. I don’t enjoy nights out/house parties and it always felt like I was behind everyone in the making friends category. Again, there I go to the outside. In amoungst all this there was an injury that made playing very difficult having to start my performing ability almost from scratch wasn’t easy. I started having problems with my upper back and shoulders too making my ability even more hindered. This was all within my first term, also during this period a very toxic relationship I was involved in was coming to an end which caused me a lot of long lasting damage that took a long time to get over. By no means do I view this as ‘Ohh woe is me, I have had it all stacked against me’ No, some things were my fault. I was shy, which didn’t exactly throw out the ‘Ohh come and talk to me’ vibe. During this first term was where shit hit the fan. 

I decided that I would discuss this with my head of department. I thought that maybe the person who is supposed to be my pastoral care would be able to tell me what I can do to sort out my life and put myself in a better position. That was my biggest mistake. They were a horrible human being, feared by some and seemingly loved by other. Everything that was discussed with him would be twisted to make you feel like it was all your fault and that it was something that you should deal with alone. Rather than drag out this section about this person I will just say this. I saw him in my first and some of my second year (He was promoted to a different position) around 20/25 times. I left that office probably 80% of the time feeling worse than I entered being told that because my playing ability wasn’t as good as they wanted (knowing about this issues I was having with playing) that I was creating ‘A bad image on the department’. Just for making an effort to try and improve my own ability in a safe environment. 7 times, I left that office and made an attempt on my own life. I just couldn’t deal with it, I was that bad that just because I am struggling even though I made it very clear that I was trying my absolute hardest to keep up I was that bad. I just couldn’t cope. It all looked very bleak. Aside from that person, there were conductors who were picking me up infront of 30/40/50 other students in the university for not being able to play at their standards. Granted, this will sounds like I wasn’t good enough and that’s it. My defence against that is I was never given the chance to improve after the beginning. I was never told ‘Focus on improving your playing then we will start putting you into groups’ like I had seen with countless others in the college. I hated him, I hated the place, I hated everything there and worst of all I hated myself. Right now, I can tell you I have tried to commit suicide 14 times in the last few years. They are just the attempts that got further than the thinking stage which honestly were daily. That still haunts me now. 

I was followed by the pain and feelings of the first year throughout the second year also. With the same issues following me, except this year there was an expectation that was on you to be better than the first year. I wasn’t and the cycle begins of being called a waste of space and that I should probably just finish by staff. I felt hated by everyone. I felt like I was the person to be avoided. Which wasn’t helped by my already poor mental health. It was the worst thing I have ever dealt with. Talking as someone who has graduated, I still don’t remember getting through the last few years and the course. It just isn’t there, I still feel that loneliness whenever I see people from college enjoying life and all my friends from high school just living there lives. I still feel that inept ability whenever I see them getting jobs. It is enough to make me cry and that again follows me every single day of my life.

The help I recieved in college was honestly life saving. I went through 2 Counsellors, 3 Mentors and honestly one of the student caring staff that I could ever hope to see. Obviously, I won’t say who they were but they are angels and each one of them are some of the best people I have ever met and will ever meet. 

There are other thing I dealt with but I won’t go that far into the rabbit hole if not to avoid this being that long but to protect myself. I’m sat here now, in my room and just ranting this out of my mind (Sorry for the poor spelling) but I can’t help but to think about me before I went in to university. Happy, sociable, musician and someone who wanted to live that life more than anything and worked for it. Now? Someone who wouldn’t want to pick up an instrument for anything and has wasted 4 years of my life and tens of thousands of pounds. So that’s where I am now. I have a loving girlfriend who is the absolute gem of my life and means the absolute world to me. I just feel like the worlds biggest dissapointment. I’m looking for work thinking that the others in my course are going off and doing masters and looking to amazing careers while I look at supermarket jobs.... 

P.S If you read through this, I thank you. It maybe means nothing to you but to me this is the skeleton of my life. It’s not everything but honestly it is what haunts me every day. 

P.P.S I haven’t proof read this so if it’s hard to read, I apologise again.