I’m finally doing my Master’s degree.

You see there. It’s already “my” Master’s degree. I have claimed it as my own already, as a cherished possession I am working for. In reality, a degree is a piece of paper that you stick in a drawer or, if, you’re a certain type of person, in a frame above a desk. I always imagined that when I got my Bachelor’s degree I would frame it with pride. When I was little the small downstairs spare room at Greenways was my “music room” and the wall above the electric piano was covered with certificates: piano and violin grade exams, speech and drama certificates, etc. They were arrayed on the wall like trophies of excellence, all in plastic black frames with gilded gold plastic trimming. I felt so proud when my eyes scanned the wall during piano lessons in that room. Those certificates seemed to be the very objects I had strived for. They didn’t just represent an accomplishment; they were an accomplishment.

My BA certificate is in a drawer somewhere in its dark blue engraved folder. Somewhere in my old room at Greenways I think. The certificate is only a representative piece of paper for three and a half years of experiences. That certificate is not an accomplishment in itself.

So now I’m doing my Master’s degree.

I don’t really know how I got here. Up until the very last days, I was still so unsure of where my life was going to lead. I was in an abyss of indecision, where every day’s delay seemed only to push me closer to uncertainty. Now that I am here, I can look back on the last few months as a whirlwind of confusion and realise that there was really never a doubt where I was heading. Some things are meant to be, and I know that this is one of those things. Perhaps one day I will look back and wonder how my life would have turned out had I taken a different path – applied for jobs, drawn a pay check. But I like to hope that will just be a passing thought, a “what if” instead of an “if only.” If there is anything I have learnt over these last few months, it has been that life never presents a clear path. Sometimes you have to beat a track through the jungle before you find your way again. I’m back on my road for a while and feel that I have time to breathe now, to look around me and take in my surroundings. They are calm and peaceful surroundings. I am comfortable when I’m studying, learning, reading, analysing. I feel at home surrounded by books, with my head in another world of thought and ideas that seems to transcend the monotonous nature of modern experience and the rush of questions that my life—our lives—demand.

And it is calm and clear and white here. These walls are sturdy and bright. The vertical blinds that at first struck me as clinical and stark are softened by the impressionistic brush of familiarity and the notion of “home.” The open living room is full of space and light. On my early trips to IKEA in search for the cheapest furniture I could find I visualised a make-shift conglomeration of styles that would give our home a somewhat muddled but rather eclectic mix of economical hominess. But partly due to IKEA’s perplexing way of charging you more for any furniture that isn’t off-white and partly due to my own dislike of dark, imposing furniture, our living room is a bright and pure and clean space. The off-white sofa, the £11 off-white coffee table that I spent hours trying to screw legs onto, the round cream-white pedestal table with the line down the middle where it splits to extend, the two rickety white chairs with their pure-white seat cushions, the white blinds and cream walls and ivory picture-frames. Nothing in here absorbs light but the books that line the light oak-stained bookshelves and the tiny television on its glass-door teak stand that I bought from eBay for a tenner in one of my thrifty moments.

When Dad and I had finished building the majority of the furniture in the living room, and when I had cleared out the boxes and wrappings, I surveyed the room with a critical eye, trying to detach myself from the satisfaction that accompanies a task completed and well done to see the room through Lori’s eyes. I thought how large and crisp the furniture made the room look and all at once I feared it would feel empty and cold. But as soon as she walked through the door I knew that the emptiness was in fact peacefulness and the light imbued the room with a clean warmth as it streaked the sandy carpet. The books play a large part in making it feel like home. Every now and then I glance up at our two bookshelves—only a half of our complete collection if you collate our separate “libraries”—and I am almost overwhelmed by the sense of possibility represented by each of those volumes. Individually, they are treasures. Together, they are a thousand windows into a thousand ideas.

We need to put some pictures on the walls to finally claim the whole apartment as ours. I have some photos that have been taken over the last few years in various locations around the world. I feel rather embarrassed at displaying them as if proudly proclaiming them as my “art.” But when I look at them all I am thrilled by the experiences I have been lucky enough to have over the last four years. Each one represents a moment in time in a place that meant something to me. The pictures from those three months in France bring back the feeling of waking up each morning to gaze over finely manicured French gardens from a window in a Benedictine abbey, letting my eyes linger on the flying buttresses that protruded into the blue sky from the window during a class discussion on expatriate writers in 1920’s Paris and almost feeling like one of them sitting at a sidewalk café with a notebook in the French capital.

So, I am doing my Master’s degree.

I feel somehow that I ought to have changed drastically from my undergraduate self now that I am in “grad school,” and perhaps I have, but to be honest I don’t feel much more intelligent or sophisticated. I suppose we each have a natural desire to look up to those one step above us on the ladder we are climbing, or would like to climb, and imagine that the view from up there must be so much more lofty and secure than that from where we stand. But to be honest, we are each of us looking up. I’m not referring to the mind-numbing euphemism of the corporate ladder, but those ladders of life that are invoked by ambition and admiration. When I was very young at Rookwood I remember downright worshipping some of the older girls in year 11. They used to humour me and suffer my adoration, even to the point of allowing me to sit with them sometimes at breaks when they would laugh at my childish manners or plait my hair with half-maternal, half-patronising fingers. My ladder has always been one of academic ambition. I adored them because I imagined that as they prepared for their GCSE’s they were so clever, so lucky to have reached that pinnacle of success. When I became Head Girl I had a vague hope that someone would look at me that way, but in reality part of me was looking ahead, and thinking how far away A-Levels seemed and how there were still those above me that I desperately wanted to catch up with. And so on it goes. At university I looked up to the postgraduates who had made that commitment to the studies they loved and who had been granted that status above the norm. A bachelor’s degree is taken for granted in the 21st century. It had always been taken for granted that I would get there. But a master’s degree is different. It’s taking a step of confidence onto a ladder that declares you are dedicated to this study.

Perhaps that’s why I’m enjoying this so much so far. It seems that those in the programme with us carry that dedication with them too. I had imagined that seminar discussions would involve a lot of one-upmanship, each of us trying to prove that we deserved to be in that room, trying to gain a status in the class as the best, the brightest, the most deserving. It seemed that way sometimes in undergraduate classes, perhaps because those of us who enjoyed the subject and excelled academically where desperate to be recognized as more than the average student. But now that we have each been accepted onto this new level it is as if we have reached the top of that one ladder and we are each in the same position now. We have each been given credit for reaching the platform we are now occupying, and for each of us there is that slight fear, I think, that we are just starting out on a new set of steps now, and we don’t quite know where they lead.

But there is a more fundamental similarity between us all than a basic feeling of acceptance and recognition. We each love this study we have committed to for at least another year. We are each taking these modules because we want to, because we’re interested, inspired, intrigued. Class discussions are more on a level (with the exception of one woman in our Victorian studies seminar who thinks she is the queen of criticism), and we are each able to add something new to the discussion with the conviction that we have valid opinions that can be voiced and recognized amongst a group of equals.

And yet, ironically, there are still those on the ladder above us. I doubt if I will keep on climbing this ladder. And yet, I wonder: if I did get to the top, would I ever turn around to look down again and realise how far I had climbed, or would I simply strive to create new rungs?