Being a Student Whilst Working With Cerebral Palsy

Me again! As promised I wanted to make a real effort to not try and abandon my blog his year! Therefore, I thought I would go back to my old student blogs where it all started and reflect on what it feels like to be a student now whilst working.

Last September I spoke about how I have now gone up to full-time work due to studying for my Postgraduate Certificate (PgCert) in Healthcare Professional Education through work at Huddersfield University. I am now a few months into the course and I am enjoying it I write this blog after a day of writing my assignment (so yeah, apologies for the typos) and I experienced flow today when I was immersed in my assignment. Also because I am already teaching, marking and doing other roles through my job as a Graduate Teaching Assistant connecting the dots is really helping my practice.

However, although I am interested in the course and enjoying the contents balancing this with working, chronic fatigue and pain is not easy. I am surrounded by the most fabulous and supportive team at work who make sure that I have time allocated in my diary to work on my PgCert and have even not given me quite a full-time workload to accommodate for this which I am grateful for. Yet, I still find myself stressing! Now, disabled or not I still think I’d be a perfectionist when it comes to assignments and although I keep telling myself that first class doesn’t matter I still find myself trying to aim for that even though it may potentially be unrealistic. Then adding my disability to this mix my brain goes into overdrive and I can’t help but think what if I have a period of heightened pain and fatigue where I can’t give it my all?

I know I shouldn’t spend my energy worrying about this because if I try my best that’s good enough (excuse the cliche). But I can’t help but fall into the same old patterns I did during my undergraduate degree where I was desperately trying not to burnout before the final hurdle. Yet, this time around I am in a completely different position and I need to consider this before getting myself worked up! For example, I have other responsibilities at work that not only take priority but I enjoy and want to give time to. Not just, this I also have different events going on in my work outside the university like the publication of my debut book on April 18th. Yes, apologies I mentioned the book again but if you follow my blog you’ll know how excited I am about this, still feels like a dream 2-years later! But, the point is I worked so hard on my book and although I am prioritising my PgCert I also want to do events the year to celebrate the launch of my book and hard work.

So, as you can tell, I have a lot of big conflicting feelings around this and am confused as to what the next few months will look like in terms of what I want to achieve and how I will balance this. I have planned my work diary quite well over the next few months and this may be more manageable than what I think. Yet, it’s quite apparent that both my pain and fatigue levels are already getting higher and we have only just entered the winter months.

Studying with a disability is hard no matter the circumstances never mind working alongside this but I do have a lot of advantages of working and studying within the same institution and I appreciate I am lucky and I have those perks. Yeah, the next few months will be hard to achieve what I want to achieve and make sure I’ve got my priorities right. But I cannot wait for the challenges that lay ahead to enhance my personal and professional development furthering my career in the profession that I love.

Thank you for reading,

Georgia x