The crushing weight of a deadline looming ever closer like impending doom, the constant worry of whether you will manage to get everything finished on time while still fulfilling your basic human needs of food and sleep to keep going. Deadline time is so rarely spoken about other than offhand comments about how tired everyone is. Each time you make it through, albeit a wreck of your usual self, delirious and riding a caffeine high induced by a week long coffee consumption in an attempt to stay awake. Yet surely this isn’t good for mental and physical health. Once it’s over you feel broken, yet you’re expected to bounce back mere days later and power full steam ahead into whichever project you’re given next. How long can you stay on the emotional rollercoaster they call art school?

Your whole life revolves around your course and anyone outside the bubble lacks the understanding of what it’s like to experience the inside. It’s a place you feel nurtured, understood, valued surrounded by people who know what’s its like to pour your heart and soul into every project for it to be boiled down to a single grade on a sheet of paper. They tell you these grades don’t matter but how else do you gauge if your work is good, that what you’re doing is worth the time and effort you’re putting into it? It’s so hard to keep faith in yourself and what you’re doing when you’re surrounded by so many talented and creative people. But that’s also what pushes you, what you thrive off of. The question of whether you’re doing something useful is one you ask yourself on a daily basis yet the only answer is yes. Of course it is. You’re using that passion that flows through your veins for the better, you’re giving something back to the world that you and you alone can. Seeing the finished work up on the wall gives a sense of pride nothing else will. You think to yourself “well fuck, I did that.” That’s why you’re here, doing what you’re doing. That’s why you put up with the sleepless nights, the moments you want to throw your laptop out of a window, the moments UHU glue does you dirty and doesn’t hold your project together as if in an ironic representation of how you feel your life is going at the time. Because when deadline time passes and you realise just what you’re capable of, there’s no holding you back from creating incredible things. All you have to do is believe it is all worth it.