Coleg Sir Gar

Date: 28th August 2023.

I realised upon reflection that there are a lot of things that I haven't spoken about here online and I think today I am ready to share some of what happened to me at college. I can't share all of the details and that is just because I literally don't remember much from between 2017-2019/20. I’m also not sure where my own personal boundaries lie around sharing very personal information online, so I am playing it safe and am going to focus on maybe 3 key moments from across the 2 years I was at college, so future me has the control and ability to make a choice to share more if she wants to. I still wish I could go back and change the shit that happened but I can’t and have to find a way to live with the (still very real) results of the 2 years I spent at Coleg Sir Gar.

I attended a college in Llanelli in Wales very close to where I used to live. I did two separate courses when I was at college. However this was not originally my plan. When I started in 2017 I was on a Performing Arts course. This was a two-year course and I had every intention when I started it in September 2017 to complete the entire course with the idea to then go on and study acting at one of the top five drama schools in the UK. I chose Perf Arts because I lived and breathed theatre. It was my entire world and I loved it more than words could explain. From a very very young age I'd always been really interested in performing. I think I've mentioned in a couple of other blog posts that I had dreams of being Elphaba in the West End and I've always loved theatre. I started acting at 8 and never really looked back. I unquestionably loved it. Theatre and acting had been my safe space and provided me with much needed escapism and magic and stories that have been brought to life. The beauty of sitting in a dark auditorium listening to the orchestra start or standing behind the curtain waiting for your show to start and being whisked away to a new world for hours on end. It was an experience that enthralled me. I am forever thankful that I had the ability to act and to learn about acting and to embrace my love of singing and acting at such a young age. And my hopes were this course would help me reach my next step and get one moment closer to my age old dream of merely standing on a West End stage. It didn’t.

When I started on the course, there were 4 main tutors. Bryony, Victoria, Christy and Sara. I’m not sure how many (if any) of them still teach it today. Bryony was head of the course when I started. Bryony was really supportive of all of the home educated kids on her course. She firmly believed that we had something to add to this course and not only the course but the college as well. She recognised that we worked really hard and that we came on to these courses because we were passionate about the subjects that we were studying. At the start she was incredibly supportive of me and I was really grateful for that. I never really interacted much with Victoria or Christy and the few other teachers that were on said course, were mainly floating in the background of my awareness.

Now I’ve mentioned Sara before a lot on this blog. I wish I could say our issues started more than a month into the course but I would be lying through my teeth. From recollection within the first few classes (i.e the first 2 weeks of the course) she took an immediate dislike to me and I still to this day, genuinely do not know (or understand) why. I was a really engaged teen, wanting to know more and learn. That trait is one I still have today. I love learning more than anything in the world. Researching and writing and studying something brings me so much joy. You get me working on something I am passionate about and it stops being ‘work’ and becomes my own little nerdy project that I fall completely in love with. When I started college I asked questions, engaged with the classes and tried my best to be that “perfect student”. But Sara just hated me and wasn’t afraid to show it and gaslight me about it. Within the first 3 months (or term 1 as we called it), I had fallen so far out of love with theatre I was considering dropping out of the course altogether. Considering I'd started the course dreaming of performing to crowds of 100s of people, the fact it only took 3 months for me to feel so broken and lost and hate the one thing that had been my safe space, I think that speaks volumes about how soul destroying it was. And the damage Sara had already done to me in a mere 3 months. I’d tried raising the issues around Sara's treatment of me to Bryony but she took Sara's word over mine and refused to do anything about it. Something I am still incredibly hurt and angered about today. This woman had a chance to make the abuse stop but she sided with her colleague and left me to fend for myself. I can’t remember why but Bryony ended up changing jobs just after term 1 finished and Sara got promoted to head of the course.

I think it's also important for context as to why this was affecting me so much, to mention that I was really incredibly isolated on this course as well. Despite many attempts to try and make friends with my peer group I was labelled as the nerd and the teacher's pet and nobody wanted anything to do with me. I have so many bits of memories of being excluded from things that my year group would do, from parties, to their musical singalongs in the dance studio, to even the lunches. I tried for about 2 months to worm my way into things and find “my people” but each time got rejected, so I eventually gave up, resigning to eat lunch by myself and research or watch things in a corridor rather than sitting and watching everyone else having fun and refusing to acknowledge my existence. I also had no friends outside of college at this time either, so I was incredibly lonely and by Christmas in 2017 I was miserable. I looked into swapping to a different Perf Arts course but was told the format and structure of my one was incompatible with the new one, so I made the choice to stay on at Coleg Sir Gar, complete my 1st year of Perf Arts and consider my options for year 2.

To be completely honest, I cannot remember the vast majority of the remaining 2 terms of Perf Arts and I’m sure there is a very good reason my brain has stored those memories away somewhere I cannot access them. However I know from things I wrote in my diary and in old posts and poems that Sara continued to be an ass towards me and with the extra power of being head of the course, she was basically unstoppable - and appeared to know as much. The only real strong memory I have of my remaining time on Perf Arts is one where I finally lost it at Sara - though in the long run, this little win did nothing to aid my battle to get her to either stop bullying me/abusing her power but boy did it feel fucking good. For context Sara taught a module about different forms of theatre. We ended up creating a Theatre Of The Oppressed piece to tour around schools, talking about abuse, bullying and mental health (the irony of those topics considering she was busy destroying my life doing the exact same things she would then preach about to other schools). I know now this module was basically about Applied Theatre (what I studied at BA level) and it makes so much sense why I loved what I was learning and found it compelling and deeply interesting. While I love the content of the class, I hated how it was taught and the treatment I received at both Sara's hand and also the classes collective hand.

We worked on this Theatre of the Oppressed piece as part of an assessment and another girl in my class and I got stuck in a group of people who were the “popular bunch”. They were loud and very much wanted things their own way and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Jasmine and I tried to suggest things but kept getting shut down or ignored (see a pattern here?). Sara knew this was happening too, she'd watch it and never bothered to step in. Jasmine ended up pulling out of the class and fighting with the college department to avoid having to interact with Sara and this specific class and won. I didn't even bother to try to request to drop the class, knowing full well the college would once again believe Sara over me.

I cannot remember what happened in the lead up to this event or why I suddenly found the bravery to stand up against Sara, I just remember finally asking her for help one day and promptly being told off for “not being loud enough” and blamed for the fact I was unwilling to out compete with my group. I had my struggles belittled and told I basically should have been doing more and was wasting Sara's time asking for help and I fucking lost it. We had a screaming match in front of the entire class, I blew up in her face accusing her of mistreatment, being a bully, being unsupportive and many other things. I refused to let her talk me down and ended up threatening to pull out of the class (and the show) a week before things went live. I left that class, burst into tears and ran. I think there was a conversation with Sara after this - again not sure of the timeline because it gets very hazy - but I know clear as daylight that she guilt tripped me into coming back to class, saying her ‘mother was ill and she was having a hard time with it all’. I have no idea if this was true or not but regardless, in my books nothing ever gives someone the excuse to deliberately mistreat another human, especially not when there is such a huge power imbalance (like there was between her and I). Those are the only memories I have from that first year at college, I can remember nothing else, it’s just foggy and blurs into one.

Second year is also the same with memory fog. I do remember feeling so fucking proud when I walked into the staff office the day I changed course and saw them all sitting there expecting me to sign up for another year of Perf Arts and watching them realise I was swapping courses was a moment of power I am immeasurably proud of. I know Sara tried to convince me to stay, stating nobody would want to take me on at uni level if I couldn’t stick it out for 2 years on a single course (how wrong she was). But I refused. I knew I wasn’t happy on the course and that leaving was the best thing to do. I thought I would finally be free of Sara and not have to see, or speak to her again but I was also wrong. Turns out Coleg Sir Gar in their infinite wisdom thought it was a good idea to make me complete my 2nd year of a random Welsh thing called Welsh Baccalaureate, which Sara just so happened to teach. Both my parents and I tried to fight this, stating I was doing a 1st year course and shouldn’t be forced to be in the room with not only my old classmates who deliberately isolated and bullied me, but also a teacher with whom we had past issues of abusive behaviour. But nobody was having it. So I had to take the 2nd year of this Welsh Bacc course surrounded by people who had bullied me AND with Sara once again, in charge.

Much like Perf Arts, the 2nd years on the Production Arts course were also nasty af to me, calling me a “Fraggle” - their term for an actor. Fraggles for those who don't know are a funny version of The Muppets and are bright, loud and very energetic. The 'joke' here was that apparently according to Prod Arts people, actors were loud, annoying and very in your face and so the term "Fraggle" was used to discuss actors in a demeaning way. This "Fraggle" thing quickly caught on with the 1st years as well and very soon I was back to being alone and bullied. I guess I was an easy target because I was quiet and didn’t really stand up for myself all that much - how things change haha. And with my support options being stupidly limited, 17 year old me made a choice. Fed up of feeling helpless, isolated and bullied, she lied through her teeth to get support and it worked. This lie is something I would not even genuinely think of saying now but I cannot blame 17 year old me for her actions, she didn’t know any better and lying got her the (much needed) support that saved her life. And I would do it all again knowing the end result was a life I could patch back up and surviving college rather than ending up dead as a result of suicide. Like I said, I am not proud of this action but the lie got Sara to stop abusing me (for a while at least), got my classmates to back off with their targeted bullying and the college to finally offer me support and believe my struggles were enough.

I wish there had been another way of accessing this support but with the entire teaching team knowing how alone and low I was and willingly walking past me bawling my eyes out in a corridor without even bothering to acknowledge that I was alive, it's hardly surprising I reached a point where a drastic lie was needed to save my life. Sara's abuse did pick back up shortly after this lie ended and at the time she knew full well I was suicidal, self harming, not eating and miserable and used that to her benefit, threatening to take support away from me if I did not do something she wanted. She became the only person who was supporting me on the teaching team and I think from recollection was actually told by the department to support me - which she also noted a few times. I don’t really know why she bothered ‘supporting me’ if she didn’t want to. As weird as it sounds I confided in her. I think this was because she was the only person who would vaguely look like they were listening and cared about me and I'd probably trauma bonded to her after 1.5+ years of persistent abuse, gaslighting and manipulation. She had me where she wanted me. But once I graduated college, I only returned to the building once during December of 2019, mainly to say goodbye to the nice people (Hailey and Lisa) who has supported me for the last 3 months of the course and let them know I was ok. I ran into Sara that day and remember precisely fuck all of what happened and what words were exchanged but I know words were exchanged between us.

I found out recently from my mother that Sara was trying to find out where I am, how I'm doing and what I'm doing with my life 4 years on from when I left her 'care'. Thankfully my mother and sibling knew better than to give that woman information on my whereabouts but it spooked me to know this woman was trying to find me. I know I am safe and even if she finds me, she will not be able to hurt me again - mainly because I'll be on the phone with the police the moment she even approaches me. There's a part of me that wishes I could recover the lost memories from college and the other part of me is as equally terrified as to what she might find in said memories as she is curious. But as of right now, I am living a life that I am happy with. While not 100% free of the trauma from college I am learning to live with it and trying to heal. I think most people in my life will state that there's still lingering effects on my ability to trust people and take their words to mean what they say and be vulnerable etc but I've found people who understand the triggered version of me is not the true me and they get that sometimes it takes me longer to respond to things or that I need additional clarity and they respect this. I'm happier than I was in college and I'm excited to continue my journey through recovery with the new people in my life - Luna and Jack included (assuming they stay in touch, the future remains unknown). And who knows, maybe at some point I will return back to UCL to do a PHD and really truly embrace the nerd that I was once so ashamed of all those years ago. And the added bonus would be that a PHD would maybe send a message loud and clear to Sara, that both her and Claudine need to realise I'm a damn site stronger that they will ever know and that being a nerd, is something to embrace, cherish and love.