Please tick a box

I always knew what I wanted to do when I was younger.  I wanted to be writer.  I wanted to create imaginary worlds that people would picture in their mind’s eye and write stories that would make people think, evoking emotion within them, whether good or bad.  I wanted to effect people with my thoughts.  When years later I found myself sat in the University library, having just completed my final exams in my Maths masters degree, I remember looking out of a window and thinking, just how did I get here and where do I go now.

I felt angry with myself.  I was angry at the fact that I allowed other people’s thoughts and apprehensions to stifle my passion and ambition, for something that not only I thought I had a talent and love for, but teachers alike.  I remember in primary school, one of my teachers actually said that they thought one of my stories could be published.  I couldn’t believe it.  I remember running to the head teacher and telling her, asking her if she could help me get published.  She just took it and dumped it on a pile of filing sprawled across her desk, the dust from the papers polluting the air.   I went back to her several times, each time she would fob me off with another excuse.  Now looking back I remember many instances like this where not only I, but other excelling pupils were praised and told they should be put up a year or entered into a competition and it was met with the same lacklustre response.

I often wondered why a teacher wouldn’t want to champion a pupil?  Why wouldn’t they want to push a child who clearly had ambition?  But looking back I guess if you don’t have a passion for teaching all pupils and you end up in a school in an area, notoriously known for shootings and stabbings, then why would you believe that any child coming from that environment is worth your time.

I’m not sitting here trying to apportion blame.  The blame lies solely with me, but fear and doubt are like seeds planted and peoples words can either uproot them or water them, causing them to grow until that fear turns into weeds stifling everything else. 

None of the above matters if those closest to you believe in your talent and what you are doing.  But that was just it, they didn’t. 

“What on earth are you going to do with English?” said one of my family members what I wanted to study at university.

“Become a writer.”

“A writer? You’re not going to make any money from that. You need something stable.”

“You need a proper job,” said my mother, her words coming from years of having to scrimp and save, with no higher education and poor health, both she and my father were unable to do as well as they would have wanted.  They wanted better for me and could not comprehend careers in writing or art.  Office worker, doctor, lawyer, these were the things they understood.

Instead of telling them all that I was going to do it regardless of what they thought, I listened to them.  Being an able student I could take my pick of most subjects, so I chose maths.  I was good at it and it was the only A level that I picked that I still liked at the end of the two years.

These events led to me being sat at that window in the library, wondering how on earth I got to this point.  I’m about to graduate and I have no idea of what I want to do or any passion to do it.  Many of my peers had found jobs for when they graduated or had decided to take a year out and spend their parents money on seeing the world, visiting far flung places or feeling good about themselves while they held some “poor” African baby abroad, or held a brick to show they built some poor sod a house. (Are there no people to build houses in these countries that they have to fly some 21 year old unqualified kid who has spent the last 3 years getting drunk on snakebite and has only picked up a pen in the last 3 years?)

I didn’t have the funds to travel and I didn’t want a full time job yet.  My rationale was if I was going to be stuck in a loveless job for the rest of my life I might as well delay it for a year.  I wanted to do something different.  I didn’t want to do mindless volunteering or travel the world aimlessly but I did want to have a once in a lifetime experience.  Whilst I have poked fun at young people volunteering abroad in places like Africa when they really have no real skills or experience and the actual benefit to the nation I think is debatable, I quite fancied doing something like that.  Why not change the picture?  Instead of a white kid holding the African baby why not a black kid?

All quipps aside, I really did wanted to do something worthwhile.  So I started to search on the computer for programmes to do.  I was quite amazed at the expensiveness of it.  Thousands of pounds you had to pay to help build someone a house.  I now was beginning to understand why the general demographic of these programmes were white middle classed young people.

I was beginning to feel it was hopeless and then I stumbled across a programme called Changing Lives.

“Do you want to make a real difference in people’s lives whilst learning about difference cultures, community cohesion and working as a unit?  Then you should join our exchange project, where you will be in a team of eighteen18-25 year olds, 9 British and 9 from a third world country, and you will live and work together for 3 months in the UK and 3 months abroad.”

Wow, I thought.  This is it.  The challenge and experience I was looking for.  Helping people, which will hopefully result in something sustainable whilst learning about a completely different culture together with volunteering in your own country as well.  This was it.

My old friends doubt and fear had started to set in.  I had barely been beyond the M25 and now I wanted to travel to some far flung place where I wouldn’t know the language, the culture and oh God, the creepy crawlies.  I started to hyperventilate at the thought.  I printed off the application and left the library.

For a week I pondered and pondered over it.  Should I shouldn’t I.  I decided I should and I decided not to tell Mum (I thought I’d maybe tell Dad.  He was always the more understanding and dare I say it, rational of the two). 

I completed the form and posted it off.  Little did I know that I had just begun the biggest hardest journey of my life, a time in which I would question the very core of my identity.  I wanted a life changing experience, and I most certainly got what I asked for.  I hate to be so cliché but they do say to be careful what you ask for.