By Mary Kerr

Pain is Growth

My head is about to explode. At least that is what I thought was about to happen last night when I finally made it to the doctor. It actually turns out that my brain has just been waking up from a very long sleep and this headache was just the beginning of my brain being stretched in ways I could never have imagined.  I haven’t even started at SCA yet and I already feel with each task I read for pre school like I have been slapped onto the front of a jumbo jet heading out to sea at 500mph without any safety harnesses. It’s just me and maybe a pair of goggles I can’t quite get on. With every task I scroll down onto I immediately think ABSOLUTELY NO WAY. THAT’S IT! – This is the one that’s going to BREAK ME! This is gong to make me pass out and just slide off the nose of the plane to an uncertain death.

But as I speed through the air all I need to remember is to STOP. BREATH. Take a moment. The fear comes from my assuming that I have to produce all of this work within the next two hours or even less, whilst still trying to find something to grasp hold of as the jet reaches greater speeds. I don’t. I have time. I just have to keep breathing and beetling away, and like the little beetle in a bucket of cream whose constant efforts to stay above board assist in churning the cream into hard butter – (ultimately enabling him to escape instead of facing a lactosal death) – I will, hand by hand move my way up the nose of the plane until I – hopefully by the end of the course, will be sitting on the roof, legs akimbo, flying into the sunset laughing!

First hand move – the Scholarship Brief. I’ve really spent the last 3 years making tiny complaints to big corporations – my way of connecting with the outside world and feeling I had work buddies I was having intense email debates with, and more often than not I would get sent a free cake bar or in a legendary battle, a Quorn Cottage Pie. But I will have to think bigger this time…

As for my headache – maybe it was some Universal nudging me to remember the lesson that PAIN is GROWTH. Or, it may have been ‘just a headache,’ one that has been there for two weeks, but I like to think I have been creatively expanding. I don’t know if I will ever tell my doctor that this was the case. He sent me off with a handful of pills and told me to go straight to the hospital. I also didn’t tell him that I had row D tickets to see the new musical Fun Home at The Young Vic and that I wasn’t going to go to miss the show without a fight and an ambulance. Hopefully I will remain as enthusiastic and bullish about the rest of my creative endeavours ahead.