Crashing into the Real World

I have crashed into the real world. Fast. No more is my student status a protective cuddly layer of ego boosting.

This has come as quite a shock, and has forced me to think not only about my resilience and the need to quickly harden up, but also about what I have to contribute to, well, life in general.

It began with my Interior Design class of eleven, giving twenty minute presentations yesterday. We walked ino the room and were introduced to a guest listener we had had no prior warning about. This person preceded to rip us to pieces. Literally. Un-surprisingly enough we were outraged. How dare this person come in with no idea how long and hard we’d been working on this research, and question us like that!

By the end of the day we were not very happy to say the least, and a few of the girls went for a wine to disuss the days precedings. After talking the positive’s through with my friend Nat, who helped me to see where my next step was, I went home for a sleep.

Following this I then tried to explain my outrage to a couple of other close people, who didn’t so much share my opinion and also agreed with some of the things that had been said to me. This is where I fell apart. All of a sudden I could not explain myself well enough to prove these people wrong, and not only that, but these are people who’s opinions I respect and they agreed that what I had written was not good enough.

What am I doing with myself? Where is this going? and what on earth is my Thesis? – is there any point in carrying on?

I had to be distracted to get over it. (Was told to stop thinking about it)

Today I have re-assesed my opinion of the guest listener and my outrage at not being warned. This is the real world. You don’t get hand-held, spoon-fed, and told how wonderful you are every minute of the day. In fact you don’t get that at all. Our tutor did us a favour. We are going to come into situations like that every day where we are having to explain and stand up for our designs and ideas to people who we don’t know and who won’t agree, and these people don’t have to be nice, some of them won’t be constructive in their critisism. We need to learn to steel ourselves to aggressive questioning, and to learn in situations like that to take the helpful information from everyone’s comments.

I personally also need to harden up. To get upset about being told something you’ve done is perhaps not good enough is pathetic but also not pro-active, and a waste of time. I need to take what they’ve said onboard and either turn it around and prove that they are wrong, or use it to improve myself and my work. I don’t need other people to boost my ego, I need to always strive to do better.

This then led me onto thinking about my future (which is something I don’t like to do too often, as I am a firm believer in living on a day to day basis and enjoying yourself) and decided that I don’t just want A job, A house, A dog (or 5), A family, I want to do something that I am passionate about, and follow through with that thing no matter what I am doing or where I am. I want to do something that is important and that I feel contributes – to what? I don’t know :s

The real world is a harsh place though and you need a really strong ‘thing’ that you are really passionate about and you need to have what it takes – whatever that is :s