Finding HopeWorld Suicide Prevention Day 2023
Posted on September 10, 2023
TW: Discussions of suicidal thoughts, suicidal urges, self harm, and irrational thinking. PLEASE think carefully before reading further if these things may trigger you or cause you distress. Please always put yourself and your mental health first.
This, I think, is the first time I’ve written directly about my experience with suicidal thoughts and urges. I’ve mentioned it in relation to the side effects of medication and written around the edges of it but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it in such detail. I have omitted certain moments and details since it’s been proven that sharing about plans and methods can lead to further suicides but this is as honest as I can manage, even though it terrifies me. But as hard as it is, I’m sharing these experiences because I think it’s so deeply important for people to understand what it’s like to feel this way, to live in so much pain, to feel so desperate. Keeping these stories in the dark only increases the shame and stigma so, even though it’s difficult and uncomfortable and scary, we need to talk about them. It’s the only way the world will get better at supporting people who are struggling.
I’ve experienced suicidal thoughts on and off since I was a teenager but for a long time, they were passive. Walking to school, I’d cross the road and, dreading the day ahead, I’d imagine getting hit by a car. But the thought would leave as quickly as it arrived. I thought it was normal. To quote Ned Vizzini, “Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it?” (I may have hated that book but that line really resonated with me.) This was before I was diagnosed as autistic* and I thought everyone felt as overwhelmed by their emotions, by their anxieties, as I did – as I do – but were just better at managing it.
*Autistic individuals, especially autistic women, are at a much higher risk of suicide than the general population; the factors include mental health problems (especially if they go untreated), the impact of a late diagnosis, challenging life events such as bullying and ableism, the burden of masking, isolation, and cognitive inflexibility, which can lead to difficulty in seeing any option but suicide. (x)
(Left: During secondary school // Right: During sixth form college)
I continued to experience passive suicidal thoughts and then, during my second year of sixth form college, I started to struggle with depression and my ever-present anxiety reached all-new heights (although, in comparison to what I experience now, I’d happily go back to it). Almost a decade, multiple diagnoses, and more than twenty medications later, my depression is the worst it’s ever been and I’ve been actively suicidal for almost two years. There have been short periods over the years (always in concert with the times I tried medications other than Phenelzine) where I’ve struggled with suicidal thoughts but, for the last two years, they have been almost constant.
They began in earnest when I started taking Xaggatin for my ADHD (and had to stop taking Phenelzine because my ADHD clinician was insistent that the side effects were unsustainable – I disagreed for multiple reasons but this isn’t the post for that story). I thought the intensity of the thoughts – and their slow, scary manifestation into urges and intentions and plans – was a side effect but it wasn’t long before my depression crept back in, sucking me down. Between that and the other awful side effects, my psychiatrist switched me to another medication, Bupropion, an antidepressant that’s supposed to help with ADHD but it only made things worse: I was so anxious, depressed, and suicidal that I couldn’t function. I tried a few more antidepressants, was traumatised by several more doctors, and had the crisis team called out (although they didn’t do anything, including the things they’d said they’d do). I quit treatment entirely for a while, unable to mentally handle it; I basically retreated to my bed and stayed there. I couldn’t engage with the world: it just hurt too much. But without treatment (I didn’t even have a therapist at this point, another thing that had spun my life out of control), the claws of my depression dug deeper and deeper. I remember one day where I had the sickening realisation that I wasn’t doing anything worthwhile with my life, that I had wasted my time and my education, that I was a complete waste of space. There was another day when I realised that something had broken inside me, something that could never be fixed, and I was no longer the person I had been and would only ever be a defective, inferior version of her. I avoided mirrors for months. On New Year’s Eve of 2021, I stared at the fairy lights in my living room and thought about how I had no desire to survive even the next 365 days. It wasn’t a resolution but I felt it with a quiet certainty. I thought about it everyday but then somehow that dreaded day arrived and I was still here, despite that certainty, despite my plans. I hated myself for it, feeling like a pathetic, weak-willed coward. It was a terrible night, not that I remember much of it given the distress I was in.
Somehow I ended up on Phenelzine again, despite my revulsion at the thought; I still don’t really know how it happened and I still find myself so angry about it that it feels like it might consume me. But, for a while, the chronic suicidality was relocated to the side burner: it was all still there but it wasn’t the only thing in my brain anymore. I could ignore it for sometimes days at a time. But after a while, my depression seemed to billow back in, like ink in water. The suicidal thoughts and urges became – and still are – the constant undertow to my thoughts and sometimes it’s all so overwhelming that I can barely breathe. Self harming has long stopped being an effective coping strategy as it just makes me feel pathetic for not doing more damage. I don’t know why I haven’t acted on these thoughts. I don’t know why I’m still here. If asked, I’d probably say, “because I’m a coward,” even though I know that I’d likely get a verbal thrashing from anyone I voiced that feeling too. I can practically hear my therapist (yes, I’m back in therapy) encouraging me to dissect that feeling. I know it’s not a healthy, rational thought but it is a real one. It’s a weird state to live in and the conflict of planning for a future I don’t particularly want to exist in is disorientating and miserable. It’s exhausting. But I know what my fate is, whether it comes sooner or later, and I have for years.
Following a slightly different train of thought, it’s very strange to me that people can’t seem to tell, just because it’s such an overwhelming experience for me. I feel like I have a massive neon sign over my head: “SUICIDAL.” But then I wouldn’t be surprised if people just don’t comment because they don’t know what to say. The last time I self-harmed, I cut my face because I needed to look as broken as I felt (or inasmuch as I could physically manage, which wasn’t enough – more shame and self-hatred) and almost nobody even mentioned it. (Not that that was the point but it did surprise me. Most of the time I avoided the question. I only lied once: I was in a weird headspace already and the question took me off guard and I just didn’t have the emotional energy to explain.) The cut got infected and took weeks to heal. I’m glad it left a scar but I resent it for not being bigger: the disfigurement doesn’t accurately reflect the feelings, not by a long shot.
(Left: The dressing on my face after I self harmed // Right: The scar after it finally healed, having got infected.)
In some ways, I feel like I’m already disappearing: I struggle to make sense of my face in the mirror and, while I don’t know about this year, there are fewer than ten photos of me in 2022; my autistic masking is so ingrained that the real, brutally honest me who is struggling and suffering (who so desperately needs to be seen) gets locked away so tightly that she might as well not exist, while a socially acceptable and palatable projection of me – the only version of me that people could want, says the voice in my head – takes over my body, acting almost without my permission; I feel like no one knows the real me any more, not after months in bed, besieged by suicidal thoughts and impulses. I feel permanently damaged by it but people are still treating me as who I used to be and not who I am now (not that I think it’s their fault – while the damage feels so deeply clear to me, I know that it’s not visible to anyone else). I remember the old me. I remember the person who could be proud of being different and who advocated for acceptance, even though she still felt broken. It was a balancing act but there was balance. Now the broken feeling has broken the scale. I feel unrecognisable. I noted down somewhere – last year at some point, I think – that feeling like this feels like one elongated near death experience. Almost every day for more than eighteen months, I’ve been so close to death that I can feel it’s presence in the air when I breathe in; I can feel it in my lungs. One decision – one split second – away. Maybe it’s just dying in slow motion. Feeling this way… I don’t know how it doesn’t change you.
I was reading various articles as I both researched and procrastinated this post and, in one of them, the author had written this: “Because depression, as we all know, is almost always treatable.” The statistics vary, depending on where you look, but a high percentage of people (this page claims between 80% and 90%) do eventually respond well to treatment. After ten years, over twenty medications, and more hours in multiple therapies than I can count, I’ve only ever managed periods of being mentally well. The longest period was, I think, two and a half years at the most. Only one medication actually helps and I’ve run out of new ones to try. The other options, according to a consultant in another very distressing appointment, would be the Ketamine trials or Electroconvulsive Therapy, neither of which doctors fully understand (the same could be said for antidepressants). Given how abnormally I respond to multiple medications, I’m terrified of how these treatments might affect me. I’m terrified of how Phenelzine is affecting me. With all of that in mind, I can’t help but wonder – and have wondered for a long time – if I’m included in that small percentage that doesn’t respond to treatment. And if that’s the case, it means that this is forever and that is an unbearable thought.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking with my therapist about this – and no doubt this post will spark multiple new discussions – and we did talk briefly about what I could write for this post, what would feel actually helpful to someone reading (I never figured that out, by the way, so I have no idea if this is helpful or not). She said that the most important thing is to talk about it and that it’s much more dangerous not to talk about it. I agree with the latter part but I’m not convinced that talking about it is helping me; I often feel like I’m just going around in circles and exhausting myself. She asked me what I would say to someone I loved if they expressed all of this to me and the truth is that I honestly don’t know. I don’t know because I’ve never heard anything that’s helped me. I think we all have the knee-jerk reaction to say, “Please stay. I love you and I’d miss you.” It’s true and it’s heartfelt but is it fair to ask someone to live in agony, in unbearable misery, because you’d miss them? We want to say, “Things will get better.” But we don’t know that. We can’t promise that. We want to say, “How can I help?” But it’s unlikely that there’s any one thing a person can do to help, although that one is more specific to the individual person. If someone asked me that, I couldn’t give them an answer because there is nothing they can do to help. It’s so much bigger than one person, than them or than me. Maybe these help some people. For me, none of these things change the reasons I’m suicidal and they’ve only added unhelpful pressure and stress. I’d hate to do that to someone else. I’m not saying the right words aren’t out there. I’ve just never heard them. Or discovered them.
Obviously I haven’t shared everything. As I said, I didn’t want to share things that have been proven to push people passed their limits (although I hope everyone read the warning and acted accordingly and prioritised their mental health) but there are also certain things that are too hard to share, too raw, too loaded. But I wanted to share my experience today, not just because it’s an overwhelming aspect of my life, but because sharing our experiences and our feelings is, as I said in my introduction, one of the few ways (and possibly the most powerful way) that the world gets better at helping people. People can only do that if they understand the battles being fought and the support that’s needed. I hope that sharing my story can help with that, even if it’s just a drop in the ocean.
RESOURCES:
Mental Health Update (March 2022)
Posted on March 19, 2022
TW: Mentions of self harm and suicidal thoughts.
It’s been a while since I did one of these updates and the last few months have been A LOT. An update is somewhat necessary, if only for blog cohesion. It’s all been pretty awful, hence all of my posts about medication: we’ve been desperately trying to get a handle on things. I’m not sure we have but there’s a natural point here, around medication and my upcoming trip to the US, so I figured now was probably the best time to do it…
The end of last year and beginning of this year was bad. Really, really bad. I was the most depressed I’ve ever been, self harming and suicidal. I’ve been suicidal in the past but never like this, never to this extent. It was awful but it was also kind of cozy and cotton wool-y, especially compared to what came next. I had a kind of anxiety-induced breakdown, something beyond and different to a meltdown, that just wrecked me. Like, it was so bad that I missed being suicidal. The anxiety was paralysing and the whole thing completely wrung me out. It was unbearable but it was probably the only thing that would’ve forced me onto the new medication – something I’d been resisting out of sheer exhaustion and hopelessness. But I couldn’t go on feeling like that. I was scared the medication would bury the stuff that needs dealing with and I still am but I couldn’t go on like that.
So I started taking Moclobemide but I was also taking Diazepam pretty consistently, given how bad my anxiety was. Things are better than they were – and I’m writing again, which is a good sign – but they’re still not great. I’m still struggling with a lot of stuff. I haven’t been able to go to therapy for a while now and I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to go back – that unexpected twist in the road certainly hasn’t helped. So I’m feeling kind of stuck in terms of how to move forward.
Physically, things haven’t been awesome either. My appetite hasn’t recovered much from the battering it took from the ADHD meds; I’m still not really eating but I am doing better than before so that’s something (the whole thing definitely hasn’t helped my already complicated relationship with food). And after a short break, my chronic pain is back with vengeance. It’s throughout my whole body but my arms, wrists, hands, and fingers in particular have been especially painful. I’m still waiting to hear back from the Pain Clinic. I haven’t written much about my experience with them; I guess I’ve kind of been waiting to have something to write about but so far, I haven’t received any proper support. They said they’d get back to me after their next team meeting but that was early November at the latest so I’m not exactly holding my breath. The Chronic Fatigue Service gave up on me – they literally told me my case was too complicated – and I don’t have high hopes about this experience either. I’ve been waiting for some sort of support for this pain since May 2020 and I know that the NHS have been overwhelmed but that is a really, really, really long time when you’re in pain.
My sleeping is better but still not great. The melatonin helped somewhat and I managed to wrestle my sleep cycle into something a bit more reasonable: rather than lying awake all night and then sleeping through the day, I am now at least sleeping mostly at night. But I’m incredibly tired all the time and I’m drowsy in the day again, just like I was when I was taking Phenelzine. I’ve picked up my Red Bull habit again – although not to quite the same degree (yet) – which I really never wanted to do again.
Between the sleepiness and the not feeling that much better, I’m not convinced by the Moclobemide. It’s pretty reasonable to assume – at this point – that MAOIs are the only antidepressants that help at all but as I said in my Moclobemide review, this level of better doesn’t feel like enough. I still don’t feel great; I don’t even really feel good. And I’m so sleepy, all the time. I don’t feel like it’s that much to ask for: to feel functional, to write songs, to have the capacity to feel good, to even be happy sometimes. Is that really more than I should hope for?
It’s been a long few months and it’s all left me feeling very raw. And, as excited as I am to get back to Nashville, I’m also terrified. The COVID risk aside, the whole world has been through this huge thing so how could going back not be different, feel different? It also just feels very soon to be out in the world for so much of every day when I still feel so… fragile, I guess. It’s like I’ve just started putting myself back together and I’m not ready for the Jenga tower to get toppled again, to start over. I don’t know if I have it in me. I just really hope – really, really hope – that everything goes as well as it can while I’m still getting my feet under me.
The Fifth Semester of My Masters
Posted on September 19, 2021
The time has come to sum up the final semester of my Masters. I am done. That’s sort of unbelievable. Given everything that’s happened since I started the course in September 2019, the end of the Masters always felt so far away and although I have lots of plans, I do feel a bit lost now that all of the work is done. Maybe it’s because I haven’t received my final grade or because I haven’t actually graduated yet; maybe once those things happen, the experience will feel a bit more… finished. It was always going to be weird – I’ve been going to this uni on and off for the last seven years – but knowing something and actually feeling it are so different.
So, here is my final semester review.
The final semester of my Masters course involves a largely independent project called the Major Repertoire Project and as long as you’re developing your songwriting skills and knowledge in some way, you can pretty much do whatever you want. People have done projects exploring identity, exploring their heritage, writing song cycles or musicals, digging deeper into their own songwriting and pursuing an artist project like an album, experimenting with newer applications of songwriting (such as in various therapies), and so on. It’s a fascinating module because everyone ends up doing something so different and so interesting. And after a spending a year or two focussing on their craft, the songwriting is so incredible; the final works that I’ve heard are amazing. It would probably take a month but I would happily listen through everyone’s projects.
For my project, I chose to explore my experiences as an autistic woman through songwriting, attempting to translate those experiences both through the lyrics and storytelling and the execution of the song, from the structure to the arrangement to the production and so on. I wanted to write songs that autistic individuals would hopefully relate to and that neurotypical individuals would hopefully gain some insight from. But while the overall goal was to create a body of work, a large part of the project involved researching our chosen area – Autism, in my case – responding to the research (sometimes that was through practice and sometimes it inspired specific songs), and reflecting on my songwriting process and how it was evolving during the project.
The module officially began in the second week of May but I’d already started working on it: I’ve been thinking about this project ever since I applied for the Masters so I was super excited to finally start doing it. But I’d barely begun when I started getting debilitating migraines that lasted for days at a time and resulted in several ambulance visits because the pain was so bad. We eventually traced the source back to one of my teeth: the emergency dentist thought the nerve was dying and diagnosed an abscess. I was top priority for an extraction and given antibiotics (which I had to have a second round of when it flared up again midway through the semester). Fortunately my university granted me an extension – giving me back the time that I’d lost – but it was a flexible extension in case I suddenly got pulled in to have the tooth taken out and needed some recovery time. Due to the long waiting list (and bear in mind that this was the waiting list for emergencies), I still haven’t had the tooth taken out and while the antibiotics and some good painkillers have prevented any more similar episodes, I’ve still been dealing with some tooth pain and migraines. So that hasn’t been ideal.
We only had four classes over the semester but since everyone was researching something different, they weren’t exactly classes. They were more group discussions where we’d talk about how our research and writing was going, whether we were struggling in a particular area, what we could do if we felt like we weren’t fulfilling one or more of the overall objectives, and so on. We had individual supervisors for the more specific guidance and problems whereas this was more general and we were able to share with each other what we’d found helpful, etc. These classes were online but we were finally able to come into the building. With most of the other courses finished for the summer, it was pretty empty and I felt safe there; you had to test negative just to get in the building and with no one around (pre-COVID, it could be a bit of a crush at times), my pandemic anxiety was a lot lower than it usually is when I’m out in the world. Being there after so much time and getting to see some of my friends again made me positively giddy! And there were some friends that I was actually meeting in person for the first time, which was just wonderful! I’m really going to miss it; I mean, I’ll pop in now and then for events and stuff but I’m really going to miss it being part of my day-to-day, week-to-week life.
Anyway. My supervisor was truly awesome. We had fortnightly and then weekly sessions and she was fantastic, not only with the academic stuff but with helping me to manage my anxiety, the things that tripped up my neurodivergent brain, and so on. And while we worked together well, we also had a lot of fun: we went on some epic tangents and there were multiple conversations that we had to mentally bookmark for later in order to actually get our work done. We got on really well and our sessions were always fun and thought-provoking, as well as helpful. I hope that this isn’t the last time we get to work together.
I obviously know a lot about Autism already so, after finding sources for that information, I started writing songs about my experiences and researching Autism further. Having the foundation of knowledge that I did, I think allowed me to research both more deeply and down different avenues since I didn’t have to spend so much time on the basic knowledge. And some of that research, from academic papers to anecdotal stories to art made by autistic individuals, sparked some really interesting song ideas (for example, I ended up writing a love song after watching Love on the Spectrum, which I found both upsetting and deeply depressing as an autistic person).
I don’t want to give too much away about the songs because I hope to release them but, over the semester, I wrote eighteen songs with a handful more that still need finishing. For the most part, I wrote alone – first because it was more convenient and then because I felt like my experiences were conveyed with more clarity that way – but I did work with a few different people, when I was struggling with a concept for example. I wrote with a couple of my friends – Richard and Luce (known as LUCE) – but I also wrote with new people that I’ve met during my time on the Masters – Luke (known as leadmetoland), Phill Vidler, and Katherine Moynihan – which was fun and exciting. It was nice to do both: I love cowriting and the back and forth of ideas but doing so much writing by myself really restored my confidence; I’ve spent so much time cowriting over the last two years and really not that much solo writing so I was nervous when I started to write alone again but after a while, it started to feel really good and that was really exciting.
But while I didn’t manage to write with Richard as much as I’d originally hoped to, we had many production sessions, mostly over Zoom. While I’d never considered the production unimportant, the project evolved to a place where the production was just as key to the representation of my autistic experiences and the emotions attached to them as the lyrics conveying the story or message. So the two of us spent a lot of time working on every little detail. While I’ve always been involved in the production choices of my songs, I’ve also always been aware that Richard knows a hell of alot more than me so I was happy to defer to his judgement. But with this project, for the first time really, I was taking the lead on production decisions – on occasion, I had the whole arrangement and production planned out before the session. But I felt more like a producer than I ever have: I was coming up with ideas that actually worked from idea to execution; I was able to pick out specific instrument, arrangement, and effect details in a way I haven’t been able to do up to now; and so on. Along with the songs themselves, that’s something I’d really proud of. I really feel like I grew as a musician and as a producer.
I absolutely loved working on my project. To be researching and writing songs about something I’m so passionate about was just so creatively invigorating. That’s not to say it wasn’t hard though. There were, of course, periods of doubt, insecurity, and anxiety over the academic elements and whether I’d be able to do as good a job as I desperately wanted to. Plus, some of the experiences I was digging into were pretty raw and writing those songs did get difficult, especially since I was suddenly doing the project without the support of my therapist, something I’d put in place to help me manage that. But apart from one bad bout of depression, my mental health was – somehow – reasonably stable (apart from my day-to-day, ongoing anxiety). As I said in my previous post, I think it was the constant creating (and creating things that I’m really proud of) that did it, that kept everything on a reasonably even keel.
Having said that, my chronic pain was almost constant, worse than it’s ever been. There were periods where my knee, for example, was so painful that I could barely walk and my back so painful that I could barely move. My Mum (once a massage therapist) said that it felt like I was storing rocks in my muscles. It certainly felt like they were made of concrete. Maybe it was my anxiety around the project, I don’t know, but the pain was keeping me up at night. I also struggled on and off with my hands and wrists, presumably from all of the typing, piano, and guitar playing I was doing. God, my various health issues are like freaking buses sometimes. I’m still waiting for physiotherapy and hydrotherapy, have been for months. I’ve just started with the Pain Clinic but one appointment was never going to change anything before the Masters ended. So all I had were various painkillers that were only sporadically helpful.
But my biggest ongoing obstacle was my difficulty concentrating, which I’m assuming is due to my (still untreated) ADHD. Staying focussed on my work was very difficult; I exhausted all of my energy trying. It felt like my concentration was so delicate that the smallest distraction would shatter it and then there was no way to know when it would come back; I felt like I was clinging onto it by my fingertips. So I couldn’t stop (really not healthy, I know). I couldn’t waste a second of it. That was super stressful and I often ended up sitting at my computer for hours and hours; there were multiple fourteen hour days, some successful, some not. People kept telling me to at least take a day off now and then but I just couldn’t. I was too scared of losing my concentration when my hold on it felt so tenuous.
During the semester, I also had a few other commitments; it was awkward timing but they were all great opportunities:
- As I mentioned in my post about the previous semester, I was part of the judging panel for a songwriting competition. That ended up being a lot of work but fortunately I managed to get it all done in time for this module to start. The end was pretty stressful because our deadline was suddenly brought forward but it was a great experience and I learned a lot from it; there were so many amazing songs and so many talented songwriters and they’re all still pretty young. I hope they keep writing; some of them I’d love to see pursue songwriting as a career. The final winners weren’t the ones I personally would’ve have chosen but I guess that’s what happens when you’re judging by committee and there are so many good songs to chose from.
- I also submitted work to a competition: three songs, two already written and one that I wrote as part of this project. I was supposed to find out whether I’d made it through the first round in August, I think, but, because they’re also an organisation and not just a competition, COVID has thrown a wrench in the plan and so the whole thing has been delayed until February. So I guess I won’t know anything for a while.
- One of my tutors is doing a research project on the many reasons why we write songs and I volunteered to share my thoughts. In mid July, a handful of students came together for a Q&A panel about our personal songwriting intentions, processes, and experiences. It was really interesting with a pretty wide range of reviews and even a couple of debates. Hopefully some of what we said was useful for the research.
- Also in July was the Taylor Swift focussed musicology conference I mentioned in my post about the previous semester and I presented my paper on some of Swift’s lyric writing techniques: her repeated use of certain imagery and the ongoing themes throughout her discography. I loved researching it (and hope to research it further in the future) and writing the paper – so much so that it ended up being over ten thousand words long and I had to do some major editing work. Presenting the paper – I ended up recording it and presenting it in video form because I was so nervous – was very nerve-wracking: everyone was lovely and very welcoming but I was just so aware of how inexperienced I was. But it went really well and I really enjoyed the whole conference; there were so many interesting papers. I hope it’s a conference that can happen again (not just because I have so many ideas that I’d love to research but because Taylor Swift is so fascinating on so many levels; there’s a lot that can be learned from her, not just around music but in business, in the development of pop culture, and so on).
In the last month, my approach reached a new level of intensity. I was working constantly, quickly when my concentration was good and agonisingly slowly when it was bad. But I didn’t stop. I even worked while I ate. I know that’s not a healthy way of doing things but I was just so terrified of getting a grade I wasn’t happy with, that made me feel like I was letting everyone down, myself included. If I wasn’t working, I felt guilty so I just kept working.
Finally it came time to try and distill all my work down to the most important points for the final presentation. My god, that was hard. Months of research, almost twenty songs, and a lot of reflection on my creative process all into an hour… Or, as I said, the most important points. But figuring what those important points were was a real struggle. Throughout the whole Masters, I felt like the module objectives were designed to trip me up – not me specifically, of course, but anyone reading them. Reading them felt like trying to interpret another language that you barely understand so I felt like I was just waiting to discover that I had it all wrong. Maybe it was my autistic brain, I don’t know. My supervisor was great regarding this anxiety but two years of feeling that way made it a hard feeling to exorcise. So I just did what I know how to do and worked through it, hoping it would be enough. And on the 6th September, I had my final assessment. Two tutors watched my presentation and then, after a brief discussion, they asked me a couple of questions, both of which were pretty straightforward to answer. And that was it. The project and the semester was over.
According to the usual rules, the results will be released in twenty working days, although I don’t know if that will apply given that my assessment was so much later than everyone else’s and they all received their results the day after I presented. So I’m just waiting to hear. I’m trying not to stress about my grade but, as I said in my previous post, I’m finding it hard. I’ve been working relentlessly – with so many obstacles to navigate – and the idea that that still wasn’t enough to get the Distinction I want so badly does upset me. I mean, I’d get over it in time but, yeah, it would be distressing. I just really hate the idea of thinking, “I could’ve gotten a distinction if I wasn’t autistic or had ADHD, etc.” I know that that’s not a healthy way to think but the standards and expectations I have for myself are somewhat warped, something that I think is due to the late ASD diagnosis and the clash between twenty-ish years with neurotypical standards and then having to adjust those expectations in accordance with what I now know is a neurodivergent brain. It’s a mess basically. But I’m waiting for the results – they should be out on the 6th October – and hoping desperately that it went as well as I hope it did.
While the ‘project-for-assessment’ is over, I definitely want to keep working on the songs, write some more on various elements of my autistic experience that I just didn’t manage in the timeframe, and then, hopefully, release it in some form. That’s the dream. I’m so proud of so many of these songs and I really, really want people to hear them and hopefully find strength or comfort in them. We’ll have to see because these projects are just so expensive to put together, from the production work to making music videos to all of the marketing.
And while this is a topic for another post, it should be acknowledged that the semester ended on a very sad note. I found out the morning after my presentation that my Granny had died. Between that news and an intense semester’s worth of work and my brain is just at overload. I can’t tell if I’m not feeling anything or feeling everything. I don’t really want to get too deeply into all of this, partly because I’m not ready and partly because, if only on my blog, I want to keep this semester and this project separate. I really just wanted to mention it in the context of all the emotions I’m dealing (or maybe not dealing) with right now.
So that was the final semester. But there’s still a couple more chapters in this story, so to speak. Graduation will hopefully go ahead as planned – in person – in November and then who knows? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
My apologies if this post is a bit all over the place: everything’s really hitting me and I’m just exhausted but I wanted to get this out while it’s still fresh.
Finding Hope 