“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.” - Maya Angelou

Clearly, I am in a quote-y mood today.  I have to say that I do love a good quote.  I think most of you have noticed now that I have one of my absolute favourites tattooed on my arm and for those of you that have been too shy to ask, it says:

"The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where

everyone is trying to make you be somebody else."

- E. E. Cummings

So we have reached the end of week two, which confusingly was our third week.  Keeping up?  I have to say that this week was a particularly tough week for me and I know that some of you also found it pretty hard going.  Trying to combine a full-time postgrad course, with planning a wedding, moving house and trying to manage a happy homelife is proving to be a bigger challenge than I had expected and things did get fairly fraught for a while.

I am constantly paranoid that I am irritating my colleagues by talking too much in lectures, seminars and workshops, not mention the fact that I am really struggling to make sure that I am reading everything that we have to read.  Am I alone in this?  I also find having around 37 folders on the go means that I never seem to have the one I want at any given time and I have just spent the last three hours printing off the backlog of lecture slides, handbooks, SE prep and guidance notes, additional reading and goodness knows what else that I had let slide.

It is obvious that the experience of doing this course could become overwhelming if we let it, but I think that we all need to remember that we are all going through this same experience.  So let's talk to each other - cry on each other - whine to each other - hell, even get drunk together.  The people best placed to support us through this experience are right with us in the thick of it.  Luckily, somebody very wise pulled me aside on Friday afternoon and gave me a much-needed pep talk: we all need to remember that we are here because somebody saw a spark in us - they know that we CAN do this and the only person that we need to convince of that fact is ourself.  We certainly shouldn't be afraid to be struggling, to feel like we need to ask for help, to feel like we are a bit out of our depths, because once we are stood in that classroom next September, it all becomes real and now is the time to seek whatever help guidance and support that we need. 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those coursemates that joined me for a medicinal Pinot Grigio or four on Friday afternoon helping draw a line under what will henceforth be known as my first meltdown week and would suggest that if anyone else out there is feeling a bit freaked, talk to your PDT, your coursemates and anyone else that will listen. It really does help!

And so to end, another favourite quote:

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

- Eleanor Roosevelt