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I Finished My MA (And Lived a Whole Other Life While Doing It)

That’s it. My full-time MA in Creative Practice is done. One year, start to finish. The presentations are over, everything is submitted, and now I’m supposed to wait politely for a grade.

But the grade isn’t the story. The real story is what happened to my life in the middle of it, and how I ended up building my own framework while the ground kept shifting underneath me.

Day One: Disaster

Let’s get this straight. I didn’t “sail smoothly through the first term” before things got messy. No. Just a few days into the course, I ruptured my calf coming out of a handstand. Couldn’t walk properly. And three weeks later? Straight into heel surgery.

So the MA began with me basically benched. Stillness wasn’t a practice at that point. It was the condition I was living in.

That’s how the whole year started. Not with sketchbooks and fresh ideas. With crutches. With pain. With me having to rethink everything I thought I was going to do.

Goodbye, Old Model

That injury was the full stop on commissions. They demanded too much from me physically and didn’t make sense anymore. So I pivoted.

Instead of pushing through, I rebuilt. I created offers that actually respect my body. A business that doesn’t rely on me grinding myself down. I wasn’t about to trade my health for someone else’s “urgent deadline.”

That decision changed everything.

The Book That Wouldn’t Wait

And then there was Stillness Is a Weapon. I didn’t sit down one day and decide, “Yes, an unplanned book is exactly what my overloaded year needs.” It just arrived. Page after page, the writing poured out.

It wasn’t for the university. It wasn’t even for anyone else at first. It was for me. A way to give shape to what was happening when nothing else made sense.

It became the anchor of the year. The piece I couldn’t ignore, even when I had a thousand other things pulling at me.

Movement, But Different

Here’s the twist. Losing movement brought me back to it. Not in the same way, no more pushing my body to its limit for the sake of proving something.

Yoga and Pilates crept in first as rehab. Then they became more. They reminded me that movement doesn’t have to be about performance. It can be about strength, stillness, and presence.

Now I’m stepping into teaching again, not as a side note, but as part of the same practice as my art and my writing. It’s all one thing now.

What I Actually Take From This Year

This MA wasn’t about “discovering new techniques” or whatever they write in the prospectus. It was about living through a year where everything changed and refusing to stop making work anyway.

Here’s what I leave with:

    • A book that wasn’t planned but had to exist.

    • A business model that doesn’t demand pain as a prerequisite.

    • An integrated practice where art, writing, and movement finally live together.

    • Resilience. Not the pretty Instagram version, but the real kind, the kind you earn when you pivot again and again and keep going.

The Mark Means Nothing

Yes, a grade will land in my inbox eventually. But let’s be real: no examiner can mark the fact that I rebuilt my whole business in the middle of an injury. They can’t grade the unplanned book that came out of nowhere. They can’t score the way I had to sit with myself when I couldn’t walk properly.

That part doesn’t fit in a marking scheme.

Reset, Not Ending

Finishing this MA doesn’t feel like crossing a finish line. It feels like hitting reset.

I started the year with injuries and uncertainty. I ended it with a practice that finally matches the life I actually want to live.

So yes, I finished my MA. But more importantly? I carried an entire year of upheaval and came out with work that actually fits my life.

I built my own framework through the injuries, the pivots, the book, and the return to movement. That belongs to me, not to the course, and no grade can measure it.