Classes too big to care.
I have after 2 weeks felt like I'm stupid, ignored, and have been spoken down to on multiple occasions. The course itself has battered my mental health, I felt I couldn't seek help or support from the discord group and have complete lost all trust and confidence in myself on the course. I have been left feeling like it was a mistake to trust the company. Firstly, the first meeting upon signing up never happened for me, I waited around the full 30 minutes on the call, sent out emails to see if something had happened and to see if they were going to reschedule etc, got no response, the next day I finally hear back that there was an issue and that they we're going to reschedule but there was 0 suitable times for myself (me being from UK and the course being delivered from USA), I reached out to support and already felt uncomfortable with taking the class but was convinced to just give the class a go and if i still felt uncomfortable after a week I could request to leave. I attended the first class and there was lots of encouragement in that first meeting with the teachers and it was incredible to meet the faces of some of the people to get involved with, the 2nd class was missed due to an emergency family situation and no support to catch up was provided, the discord group has a mixture of people but most were ex or current college students and most had no time for those with little to no art class experience (it is not a beginner friendly environment), I raised concerns again but got ignored, I decided to try again with the next class and the class itself was ok, but the project needed to be completed was art college level, again it's not beginner friendly, specific books were heavily needed and referred to which made it impossible to do the course without purchasing the additional materials which for someone like me, disabled, unemployed and low benefit income meant going without dinners for myself for a few days just to be able to buy the necessary materials. Even after all this I found that with my dyslexia, mild learning difficulties and mental health difficulties support wasn't there. Instead the only real support I ever got was from a couple of other students and even then most other students made me consistently feel stupid for not understanding what needed to be done, it started pulling on my mental health and I did my best to hold on. The 4th class came along and it got significantly overwhelming, I felt I couldn't ask for help because I felt like I would just be made to be stupid again, I acknowledged that the environment was making me lose confidence in myself to try, the course material made no sense to me as most of it required visualisation, something I physically cannot do as my mind has no ability to form pictures or images, I attempted to reach out to support once again and just got ignored. I have now walked away from the discord group after being put into a mental spiral where the darker thoughts have become significantly difficult to ignore (I'm on phones trying to get help as body is shaking, i'm in tears and quite frankly don't want to be around anymore) and feel like I was taken advantage of.