I first learned the rules of art at an atelier while I worked as an au pair in Barcelona. Growing up, I would dream about the control I’d have once I was an adult, and I’d spent the years leading up to it knuckling down in school and getting lightly bullied at my café job to make it happen. The atelier worked in the traditional sight size method, a 19th century pre-camera approach to reproduce real-life objects by standing far enough away that they could be translated onto your easel at exactly the same size. It was a way of mechanising the process of art, and restricted its production to those with this specific skill. The process was gruelling, but in the face of the anxiety of a blank canvas, it offered a soothingly rigid way out of it. 

I spent my mornings on my feet, tasked with producing an exact copy of a printed-out drawing and my afternoons flicking my eyes back and forth between the naked model and my page. Over a series of weeks, we were to block-in lines, then shapes and shadow lines, and eventually fill in subtle detail with light strokes of sharpened charcoal to produce one drawing at the end of it. The idea was that the more information you added, the harder it became for the lines on your paper not to join together and convince you that their distorted shape was true to life. The tutors made their way disapprovingly around the semi-circle of students, taking us by the shoulders to encourage us to step further back from our easels, to stretch our plumb lines between our thumbs across what we were seeing, and what we thought we were seeing, and implored us to really look. 

It was my first introduction to looking at the world as an adult, and navigating a foreign country, another language and a group of people who were almost exclusively ten years older than me made me feel like I was the one standing naked in front of an audience of gawking students. It seemed clear to me then that art and life would be a constant pursuit of trying impossibly hard to defer to an ever-expanding set of rules, in a series of increasingly daunting new starts, where I would never quite feel good enough. After class, I put the two Catalan boys to bed and found myself staring at the wall, my body aching but my brain still whirring away, missing feeling like I was useful for more than just what I could approximate with my body. 

As a result, as soon as I got to Trinity, I concentrated all my creative efforts on writing, filled with relief about how relatively effortless the student experience could actually be. I ended second year all set to spend the next one in an old student town just outside Madrid,  while running one of the campus magazines at a distance. But although excited to go back to Spain, I struggled to see beyond my sense of imminent ending. Most of the friends I’d made here would be gone by the time I came back, and were already making worried attempts to plan what they would do after they graduated. My friends from school, having already started jobs, didn’t come back to our hometown anymore. I felt untethered. In the face of uncertainty, I forced myself to paint every day that summer, getting into a painful rhythm of spending hours at the table, never quite satisfied because I couldn’t replicate exactly what I saw. 

Erasmus is one of those things that looks like people are pretending to be having a nice time online. But even though I believe in the maxim that not everything you see is as good as it seems, sometimes it absolutely is. A whirlpool of little responsibility, new people, cheap trips, grant cash and more vitamin D than I’d ever experienced in my life meant that this time around, my first semester in Spain felt like a three-month long party. I had no time to paint anymore. I bashed out the organisation for the magazine when I could scrabble together enough time alone, and went straight back out again. There was a whole new world to see. 

But where there is life, there is loss, and I went into second semester feeling like I had less friends than the none I’d started the year with. In December my friendship group had splintered in two, and almost all of the people I saw every day were due to leave. In the new year, there were no societies or new people in my classes, and my once five-person flat was now down to just two. I went to events jumpy, walking around like a gaping open wound. The same handful of bars felt seedy the second time around, filled with a whole new set of faces looking to go out and see what I’d already seen. I felt apprehensive about the magazine coming to an end. I couldn’t bear another new beginning.

Now left with far too much time to spend on my own, most evenings I took the cercanías to the capital, which dropped me a short walk away from one of the city’s grandest buildings, Círculo de Bellas Artes. At the top of this high-security, high-ceiled, marble-paved vestibule was a small wooden art studio. For a monthly fee less than the price of going to one life drawing class in Dublin, I could come whenever I liked to a quiet bright space and draw. 

Without the pressure of having to follow someone else’s rules or make the most of an expensive class, I had room to experiment. I didn’t need to fall back on the traditional approach by panicked default. I no longer boxed people in, but cast gestural circles around with my pen and carved into them. Instead of spelling everything out for the viewer, I learned to trust them to interpret what the drawing left unsaid. My sketches got lighter and my strokes got looser as a result, and for the first time, the world didn’t implode when I broke the rules of what I felt I should do. It got bigger. 

Halfway through the term, and no new friendship group to travel with having emerged, I booked a solo trip to Seville for Semana Santa. For the week of Easter, most cities in Spain put processions on every day to commemorate what Jesus is supposed to have given up for people’s sin. And the South of Spain goes all out.   

I took the high-speed train from Atocha early in the morning at the start of the holiday. By the time I got there, the sun was high in the sky and the wet streets were empty. Everyone spilled off the city tram two stops before the end of the line. I asked an older woman in a brown fur coat what was going on. Hay una procesión, she said before trotting off the carriage as fast as she could. Outside the cathedral, the road was blocked off and with rows and rows of chairs laid out for mass. In the distance, there was the sound of people, and the funereal throb of a brass band. 

I made my way in the direction of my hostel, but kept losing myself, every road I needed to turn down blocked off. I eventually escaped through a scattered gap in the hoards of people in their Sunday best, but when I got to the winding 12th century streets, I couldn’t squeeze through anymore. People were pressed to both sides of it, eagerly awaiting the procession to pass through or trapped in the middle of it. I stood wedged between a panicked Portuguese family and two Andalucían men standing on their tip toes on the corner. 

The anticipatory chatter fell to a hush as an impenetrable stream of faceless hooded men started to file through the middle of the street, walking in slow march. After a while, more shuffled behind them carrying an intricately gold-encrusted shrine to Jesus’s birth over their heads. Complete silence fell over the crowd as the churchmen manoeuvred the ten-foot-long jangling statue around the corner, their biceps slightly shaking under the weight of it. 

All ages and types of people, religious and not, were pressed together as the churchmen passed, with no choice to be anywhere but there, standing in reverence for the spectacle that the city and its people spent all year preparing for. Eventually, people clapped as the last of the hooded men peeled away, and the procession snaked around to a different part of the city, for a new set of people to be forced to pause and consider that life is a series of resurrections, and it’s up to us whether we choose to see that as a blessing or not. 

I came back to my Spanish student town and, after interviewing dozens of student journalists over Zoom, I handed the magazine that I’d spent all three years at college involved with over to a new team. Suddenly the control I’d dreaded losing (even if it was to a talented group of people) came back to me as a gift. For the first time in forever, the things I enjoyed doing, like writing and painting, were no longer an obligation or stricken with rules, but a freeing choice to do the things that I loved about being alive. My training in traditional art allowed me to learn to step back, and really see exactly what I had in front of me. 

By this point, the people I’d slightly known from first term had become my genuine friends. As the days got longer and the city started to sweat, we planned trips to the city’s pools and spent long afternoons together in the courtyard of their student accommodation. More often than not, we shifted our plastic chairs along and invited the new students to come and sit with us. And dizzy from tobacco smoke and sipping from big cups of homemade tinto de verano, starting over came to taste sweet again.