i will be graduating with about £50,000 of student debt, with a degree that makes people laugh awkwardly when i tell them what it's in! and god, uni was a time in my life where i felt fifty shades of fucked up and miserable! i ended up living at home half the time for the final few months just so i could be held accountable for such things as: showering, eating, and drinking water.
since leaving uni (and, to be fair, going on better medication) my mental health is doing great and i'm all moved out and on my merry way in life. but i think it was worth the £50,000 anyway.
most pressingly, because my Creative Writing degree showed me how i didn't want to be a professional writer. networking fucking sucks. and i love people! i love talking to people. but talking to people because we were mutually aware it was an advantageous connection, i just felt a little holden caulfield the whole time. he's a pretentious dick, and maybe i am too. it was still totally incongruous to my idea of being a writer. i had never really clocked on that it was a proper, actual business.
another thing - poetry! i'd never written a poem before uni. and now it's my favourite thing to write. poems pop into my head constantly. i feel so much from reading them now. it's like seeing a new colour, kind of - so much extra depth to the world that i hadn't been able to see before.
i had to pick up a summer job to work off some of my weird first year spending (so many takeaways, so much vodka) and it was in a cafe. and i realised that - actually - working in a cafe made me happy. i liked being outside, on my feet, cooking, meeting people, making them coffee. it was also a farm (shoutout to clive's) and i realised that i'd been telling myself i wanted to live in a city for years without actually considering what i liked. i like animals, trees, mud, potato tractors. i like all the rural chaos. i got to know myself a lot better through that.
i don't think it's possible to ever be 'fully-formed' as a person because in 20 years i'll be a stranger to myself as i know me, but i learnt a lot and grew a lot. maybe £50,000 worth of growth. we'll see