Life is unfair, kill yourself or get over it

Privated last post, I think I have enough comments now.  Few months to decide.  Realistically, I feel I’m going to have to push ahead with this year.  A large part of me just really wants to get started, I spend so much time reading student nurse forums and feeling jealous.  My non-realistic side is saying, “Follow the dream!  The insanely competitive dream!” From people “in the know” (nurses, lecturers), I’ve been very strongly advised to go this year due to intake cuts next year.  So who knows!  Either way I can’t mope and wah about it.  

If I’m being really, painfully (don’t stick the boot in) honest, I just hoped to feel all excited about it all, and I’m not. This is a once in a lifetime thing, really.  After fucking up my education so badly the first time around, I never imagined I’d even get to university. I’d allowed myself to hope I’d get to the place I was so desperate to go to. Then I messed up my interview!  Whoops. If we’re being all psychoanalytically about it, it’s probably because, when I was a teenager, I was desperate to go to study English at Trinity in Dublin.   I even printed out a photo of it and put it on my bedroom wall.  Up there, amongst my ripped wall paper in the room with the broken door and the exposed nails on the floor.  “That’s where I want to be!” I’d say to everyone.  I wanted to tread the same paths as Balthazar B.

I was too mad to, I didn’t even get my A-Levels.   I felt like I let everybody down by not getting to where I was expected to academically. This was my, I guess, Trinity of the Twenties.  Having clawed my way out of being mad and working hard in class, and generally thinking I’d be a bloody good mental health nurse, I allowed myself to get my hopes up too much.  I didn’t feel entitled to a place, I just felt that I’d really bloody appreciate it a lot.  There’s also the background thing- I’m aware that my background makes me want to do very well for myself, to rise as far above where I came from as I can.  Not to distance myself (two pints, a fag and any mention of Iain Paisley will always prove that no matter where I go I’m still a sweary midget from West Belfast), but to prove something to myself.  A silly point, maybe.

And a wee part of me feels like I let everybody down again.    It’s very irrational and silly, I know that.  But I can’t help think of what my dad would say.  He’d say nothing negative of the sort.  Maybe continuing disappointment that I wasn’t the famous writer he imagined I would be one day (Sorry, dad).

But even though I don’t believe in god or heaven I still want to make him proud of me.  My mum hasn’t even asked me about university, I don’t think she even knows I’ve applied.  But I remember her lying to my granda when I moved to London and said I was at Oxford.  I wasn’t, I was living in sin with my boyfriend and working at temp jobs.  She wasn’t proud of me then. Unproud enough to lie about where I was and who I was.   Does she tell the truth now?  I have no idea.

I’d hoped I’d be all happy and celebratory when I got my (the one for now) offer.  I really wanted to be, I tried to be.  I wasn’t, that’s passed, and there it is, all gone.  I think I am just disappointed about that, almost above all else.  I wanted another go at it so I was excited instead of anxious and worried.  I feel tearful sometimes when I think about it all, have actually cried like a knobber. I hope that’s just worry, just normal anxiety at the unknown, not knowing what I’m letting myself in for, not knowing whether I will cope, whether I will do well, whether I will make friends, etc.  Because I wanted to go to King’s so much, I researched the living buggery out of the place.  (Have you gathered, dear readers, that I can be a bit obsessional?)  To some extent, I knew what to expect if I went there.  Where I’d be placed and so on.  So I felt less anxious about it. I was really excited when I was there, I’m just gutted, really. Now I don’t know, all I have is fear!  I’m so scared.

In the meantime I’m emailing people who go to the places I might go to, and tomorrow I’m going to go  back to the campus and have a look around, get another feel.

If it sounds like I’m being too analytical and taking it all very seriously, it’s because I am.  Compare to where I was last year- on benefits and facing a life like that forever, or until I was kicked off them and homeless.  This is a big thing for me, it is scary, and I am scared I’m going to make a bad choice, or that I’m just going to feck it all up!  I don’t even have a job (was supposed to start mid-March, have heard nothing) so god knows what I would actually have done for the next year anyway.  I’m going to walk into central London wearing a sign with, “Will blog and moan for rent and council tax” on it.  What a fail I am!  I’m being oddly blase about that one.  Things usually turn out okay, I do believe that, I do believe things will.

I don’t have my certificates yet, so I may end up with nothing, which would be hilarious and probably richly deserved.

But in short- I think I’m going to go this year.  I want to get started, I think, more than I want anything else.  I want to be a nurse in 3 and a half years, not 4 and half.  It doesn’t matter if I was disappointed, or if I don’t know what to expect and I’m scared.  That’s life, la!

Thanks for the advice, chaps.  I’ll leave it here because I’m boring myself going on about it all now!

x