I am writing this as I sit in the food court/seating area of Robert Gordon’s University. I can look out the window to the green trees and the River Dee and all around me are other students, lecturers and just the usual university crowd. It feels weirdly similar but also totally different to Exeter University (where I did my undergraduate degree). I graduated with a BA in History and International Relations with Study Abroad in 2018 and if you had told me then that in four years time not only would I be doing a masters but that it would be in social work then I most definitely would have laughed. But a lot has happened since summer 2018 and I am a very different person now and want different things.

I started this blog in November 2018 at a very difficult time in my life at the start of a gradual (then more dramatic) health decline that would last several years and made me the disabled adult I am today. To cut a long story short as I have spoken about it before in October 2018 I was knocked off my bicycle in a hit and run. Due to some appalling (and on reflection borderline negligent) care in A&E it was a week before the extent of my injuries were picked up. It turned out I had an acl tibial spine avulsion injury as well as some more minor damage to my mcl. I needed an operation to pin my knee back together and pull my acl back in place. I ended up needing four surgeries, the last one being in August 2022. Everyone cross your fingers for me that there are no more surgeries.

But going back to November 2018. Post operation one I was in a cast that ran all the way from my hip to my ankle for a month. I couldn’t weight bare at all really, I was on crutches or in a wheelchair, in huge amounts of pain, on a lot of pain and other meds and struggling mentally to piece together what had happened. In my head one moment I had been working in my graduate scheme role in my new adult life in London and the next I was back home in Aberdeen almost totally dependent on my family. I desperately needed a focus and so I started this blog. I had been considering it for a while, particularly since attending a travel social media folks meet up in London. So Lifeofmorag was born. I could never ever have imagined everything I would go through over the next few years. But I also never could have imagined beating the demons that I did and finally landing up doing a masters in social work.

Flashing forward to today (apologies this blog is a little jumpy in terms of timeline but hopefully you are with me). It is day two of my MSc in Social Work. This course is two years and three months long. Two years to achieve your postgraduate qualification which allows you to professionally qualify and then a further three months to write your dissertation if you choose to do the full masters. At the moment I think I will definitely do the dissertation but I’ll get back to you on that some day nearer the time. For the moment I just need to work my way through the first weeks of teaching. My timetable is much more full than my undergraduate degree. Which I was prepared for in theory because it was said multiple times in the application process that this was intense and you know it’s a masters. But I won’t lie sitting here adding things into my calendar it has hit me a bit just how much there will be to do.

I was chatting to my sister about feeling anxious and reminding myself that absolutely everyone on the course, unless they are some kind of superhero, is in the same boat. We are all anxious and unsure how we will get on. Having a talk by some of the second year masters students was definitely reassuring that yes it is hard but it is manageable and more importantly worth it. I appreciated the four students being honest about the ups and downs of the course. There is nothing more annoying than going to an information night and all people say is how amazing everything is. Nothing is perfect and it makes me more anxious because I can’t prepare for the bits that will be hard. With my additional mental and physical health needs there is that extra worry about my ability to manage. Certain experiences of being rejected from things because of my disability do stick in my mind. Life is more complicated now. But on the flip side I have more coping strategies and a better understanding of myself now than I ever did pre accident. I have spent the last 2/3 years learning how to manage my emotions in a way that wasn’t harmful. I have a huge toolbox to draw on when things get hard.

We are a very diverse class of people in terms of age, life experiences, under graduate degrees, nationality etc. which of itself is very cool. The 19th of September is the first proper week of teaching. Last week, so the 12th September, was the introduction. We were supposed to start teaching on the 19th but the whole country was off for the Queens funeral. My timetable is very very full so feeling anxious but also excited.

A final note from day one of proper class so the 20th we all had to introduce ourselves to the seminar group (there are two groups in the course). People all had their own stories and I still can’t believe it but no big deal at all I mentioned I had been sectioned and worked with a social worker and it was fine. People were surprised by how appalling your treatment is after being sectioned (that’s a blog post for another day and still deeply traumatic for me to talk about) but no-one judged or behaved weirdly to me. Obviously I didn’t go into why I was sectioned as that’s private to me and my loved ones. But it was so freeing right from the start to know I can engage with the course and it’s discussions as my whole person with my life experiences without shame. Because without those life experiences I never would have been a social worker. My trauma didn’t make me brave, nor am I glad it happened but everything I have been through did show me how brave I could be. Let’s see what the next two and a bit years bring.