Last month as part of #CrazyRebelliousArt challenge is posted about my biggest successes so far but today is the other side of the coin: speaking about failure. As someone who is still young it doesn't really seem like I should have many failures in life and truthfully I don't. But what I do have, and what I think most people have at this age, is things that happen in your life that really change the direction in which you moved forward.

To me these events in my life are both things that originated back at Secondary School, the two pivotal moments that really altered my future could in some way be considered as failure would be 1. Doing horribly in my 5th year exams and 2. Becoming fed up with art during that part of my education. In saying this though, the consequences of what have happened since then have been good and I wouldn't change them at all!

So yeah, first up is doing horribly in my exams. In 5th year I took 5 higher subjects (I think these are A-level equivalent) which were Art & Design, English, Graphic Communications, Information Systems, Computing (although I switched to this from Maths after Summer). I guess a lot of people would think these as "easy" subjects which I suppose in some circumstances they are. But, for me on a whole it wasn't an easy year. With computing I pushed myself right into the deep end and the main focus of the course was coding. Don't get me wrong coding isn't too bad, well, when it's HTML. But this wasn't html. This was like proper programming code! I could easily figure out how to write it up but when it came to the theory it just didn't stick! In the end this year I mainly struggled with Computing, English and Art & Design. Due to Computing for the reasons above, English because my essay's weren't passing and Art & Design being because I wasn't working on stuff that made me happy which leads me onto part 2...

Throughout School, there was very much a "standard" way to do things, especially in Art & Design. Even though it's one of the most creative and expressive subjects you can do it was very controlled and very strict on what you would do. During 5th year I wanted my "design" project to be a Graphic Design project but due to my school "not having the software" I wasn't allowed, although other schools did graphic design projects with just pen and paper. Anyway, throughout the 3 years of doing Art & Design in an educational sense that would lead to an exam, it killed and destroyed my sense of creativity. Until I got to College I didn't feel like a Creative person and until Uni earlier this year I never called myself a Creative person.

But yeah, through School, mainly 5th year, I failed myself in a way. I didn't do anywhere near as well as I had hoped to do in my exams and I now realise I lost the creative part of myself. But I've came out the other side and now know that leaving after 5th year to go to College was the best decision as it not only let my Creativity grow back but it also let me thrive in an area doing something I wanted to! Over my years at College I developed my skills and I ended up with A/A Marks in my two Graded Units which is so great to me! 

Moral of the story? Don't let your failures get you down. Push through them and let them lead you to bigger and better things!