Near the beginning of my second year of studying filmmaking at the University of Sussex, I came to the slow realisation that I was no longer interested in pursuing the career I had dreamed about since I chose my GCSEs seven years ago. For the past two years, I’ve been oscillating between ignoring this slowly growing feeling and desperately trying to gather my life together to figure out how the hell I can rectify this decision that no longer honours my true desires.
I’ve always pictured my life as a fast-moving river cutting through the landscape of existence. The decisions I make are not diversions that split at a crossroads; instead I see them as little estuaries that flow into the current, joining the tides travelling endlessly ahead of me. They merge into the waters and become invisible, and I find that invisibility reassuring.
So, when in the summer of 2023 I looked up from my little boat and spotted, in the distance, a rushing brown sludge headed straight for the peaceful river of my life, I panicked. Suddenly, the transparency of my life goals had shifted, and I didn’t know how to get it back.
I’ve always been very career oriented. Even as a little girl, whilst all my friends were playing at being mothers and wives, I took the part of the working father, knowing from a young age that the fulfilment I would get in life would be from work, not family. I was also a very academic child, the gifted kid top of my class in primary school, but with a slowly dwindling ability as I reached further and then higher education. This is not to say I’m not still academic, but when your self worth has always been reliant on achieving top marks, any drop from consistent 100s feels like a gunshot to the back of the head.
Making my way to university was the gold medal I had been striving for since childhood. Now that I am graduating, I’m struggling to see any sort of future for myself. This experience was my future, and its ending has been made so much more difficult by my decision not to continue into the film industry.
Nobody warns you about the performance you are required to give once somebody places an association onto you. To my friends and family back home, I am “Keira the filmmaker”, always the critic, the creator. If they could see me now, standing next to the people on my course, they would see a resentful, dispassionate person stuck in a writer’s-block rut trying to scramble her way out of the muddied river of her own life. The pressure of being defined by your area of study is something I was woefully unprepared for, and has left me feeling like an intruder drowning in an ocean of passionate creatives.
During the past three years, I have found myself yearning for a hobby which has been attached to me since I could hold a pen. Writing short stories and song lyrics into tiny spiral-bound notebooks was something that defined my free time as a child, and I fell ever more in love with creative and academic writing all the way through school and both of my English A-Levels. I feel to a degree like I betrayed my one true creative love, which is why I am coming crawling back to it with a master’s degree next year.
Am I terrified the same thing is going to happen to me in my next level of study? Absolutely. But if I’ve learned anything from my undergraduate experience, it’s that it’s okay to change your mind. My mum sent me off to uni with the assurance that “if the only thing you learn is that you don’t want to do film, that’s just as valuable as anything they could ever teach you.” And she was right.
While this may come across as a relatively negative review of my university experience, I would like to stress that I ultimately do not regret choosing the course I chose. Without making the decision to study filmmaking at university at seventeen years old, I would never have met some of my favourite people in the world. I would never have created one of my proudest pieces of work. I would never have paddled my way to the clearer waters of a master’s degree in my favourite creative endeavour.
So I will graduate in July with pride, with friendship and with the knowledge that there is always calm after the storm.
Another article you may enjoy: https://thebadgeronline.com/2025/07/in-the-space-between-who-you-were-and-who-youll-become/
