Failure is just an event, not a characteristic...

 

"Failure is just an event, not a characteristic..."

These beautiful words were said to me by an incredible woman who I recently met and within minutes she had changed my outlook and my life forever. And the best part of it is that she doesn't even realise the impact that she had, she was merely being herself. What an amazing woman!

For weeks I sat around in my Harry Potter pyjamas and baggy T-shirts contemplating if I had made the right decision. Before Christmas I made the choice to leave university and return home for the rest of the academic year. This did not come easy to me at all but I had a decision to make and still to this day I do not fully know if it was the right thing to do and this still terrifies me.  I began my term in Falmouth, Cornwall at the University of Exeter studying a degree in English. Whilst I undeniably have a huge love for literature and all that it offers, I could not help but feel a gap when I was sat in the lectures, as if something was missing. I constantly felt off centred and as if I had so much more to give.

I felt inspired by the literature, as I always have, but I had to decide if I was content with only ever experiencing a love of others work or whether I wanted my words and opinions to affect people in the way that Maya Angelou's "Still I rise" and Iyanla Vanzant's books do. There are moments when I feel that centeredness within me, like now for instance as I write these words, and this is how I know I did make the right choice for me. The clarification if it was right for my career is being impatiently anticipated!

I cannot deny that I felt more content than I ever had in Cornwall with regards to feeling loved and appreciated by those around me and the friends that I had made. I still wake up some mornings and expect to be able to have breakfast with my fally girls and snuggle in bed to watch episodes of One Tree Hill. It still hurts me that I no longer have them so close but I had to remember that I can always visit them there and regain the time lost but I would never get over spending three years studying there to find myself unemployable and unmotivated before I had even graduated.

If I'm being perfectly honest I think I found the realisation that I had made a mistake and failed was the hardest of all to reach. My entire life I had always succeeded in education from me being head girl to me exceeding in an exam to gain a place for my sixth form education. I did not know what it felt like to fail in education and this was the hardest reality to admit. It wasn't until it was pointed out to me by my momma that I wasn't even looking up when I walked that I realised something had to change. I had truly reached the bottom and I could feel myself desperately scavenging for confidence, something that had long disappeared from my life. I still feel as if I am climbing to reach the point of self-assurance that I once had "but still, like air, I rise."

I left Exeter University to pursue my dream elsewhere and every day I feel like I am one step closer to it. I once told my Mom that I "had to accept that I have limits" but now I see that I truly have no limits when I'm doing the thing that I love. 

Love Liv x