By Marley Muirhead

The Old Switcheroo

Last week I switched partners for the first time and that, to put it simply, felt like a madness. Not because of the people I was working with at all, it’s been great working with both Carly and Lawrence. But more in terms of the amount of work that this change brought about. We had to start a new book from scratch and have it complete in a week for Friday book inspections. Plus we had to juggle our time across about four people during the week. This isn’t me complaining. I just found it difficult. To be completely honest it was the first time I had a bit of a melt-down about the course. I got home on Wednesday night after leaving the studio at 9pm, got home and just cried. Like super ugly, ungodly cries with my hands gripped on my face and the rim of my glasses piercing into my fingers. Then I stopped after two minutes because quite frankly I didn’t have the time to go on much longer. Time management, ay? I often think that when we talk about these moments it seems like a grab for sympathy. My ego is very happy to accept that from you if that’s really what you want to offer up. But I think there’s something very natural about just letting it all out without holding back so that you can move past it. I do think that that moment was indicative of how I was feeling. And I do not think that crying for the amount of time it takes to make instant porridge is a sudden quick-fix to the stress we’re all under. But I don’t think that having a melt-down suddenly means I’m in a more permanent dark place. I just needed to get all the jazz out of my system. 

However I believe there is gold in figuring out what made you that upset in the first place. For me it was not the workload so much. (Future SCA-ers, don’t think I’m underplaying how much you have to do, shit’s real here). What bothered me is that I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to produce anything good enough for myself. Not even for the mentors and Marc and my peers. The only reason to care about their standards is because you care about your own. At least that’s how I see it. So was I going to be happy with it? I felt so overwhelmed that I got all creatively constipated and panicked and, well unless you’re in the business of making very angsty trap music, that’s not the best place to be creative. So after crying my eyes out what happened? I still wasn’t feeling great but I pushed through and tried to be as positive as I could. I tried to make work as well as I could. Over the weekend I thought about what I was going to do differently to make this week a better one. And so far it’s been working.