Oooh… Jackanory time, is it?
There’s a short answer and a long answer to this one. The short answer is that I have just started working part time in a warehouse (yay for working for people who think everybody working in their warehouse is a liar and a thief), and I intend to stay there until I start doing my resits back in Aberystwyth in the end of January (need to resit my major project, due to having had a minor breakdown in my final year).
As for the longer answer, well… I should probably preface this with something I mentioned in another recent thread: that I am autistic. I started suspecting that it was probably the case about three years ago, was referred for diagnosis about two years ago, and finally received my official diagnosis about a month or so ago.
I bring up my autism because it has coloured my entire life up until this point, whether I realised it at the time or not; from the bullying (real or perceived - it can be difficult for an autistic 10 year old to tell the difference between playground banter and actual meanness, but with some people it did get physical) that I received as a child to my struggles in some areas of education and later in finding work.
I left high school with 4 GCSEs at A*-C (A in Science, B in Maths, C in French and Drama), and went to the local sixth form to resit my English GCSE and, because they could only accept full time students, study a VCE (Vocational Certificate of Education, which was worth 4 GCSEs) in Business Studies. After I finished that, I got my first job - a casual job at the local hotel waiting tables for weddings and the like. It wasn’t that bad a job; I did some bar work (even though I was still only 17, making it technically illegal) and gave people their food. I only received £3 an hour, if memory serves, but it was some pocket money while I started my A levels.
It was while I was doing my AS levels that it was discovered that I had learning difficulties - I was diagnosed with dyspraxia (though the paperwork has since been lost), and I started getting 25% extra time in exams. This didn’t help much; in my three AS Levels (Computing, Theatre Studies and Psychology), I only achieved a D and two Es respectively, and then I dropped out of sixth form deciding that academia probably wasn’t for me, and decided to join the army. Those of you who have met me can probably tell that I am in no shape physically to be a soldier, and I wasn’t in much better shape back then. Given that autism is an automatic bar to entry into the armed forces, it might be for the best that I didn’t get in anyway - military life probably wouldn’t have suited me very well.
Around that time, I started working at the restaurant that I have since worked at on and off for nine years, and a year later I went to a different local college to study for a BTec National Diploma in IT. I passed, barely. I had two friends on this course; one who was diagnosed autistic as a child (we sometimes joked about him being so special that he had to go to a special school - I’m fairly sure he took it as a joke, though as it happens, he actually had gone to a special school), and one who was diagnosed with autism himself about a year ago. I suppose in hindsight, it’s rather telling that they both seemed perfectly normal to me ;). It was also around this time that I started doing some coding on a voluntary basis for a text based online RPG (a MUD) - largely just fixing stuff or very occasionally implementing a new feature, such as a unified chat system to replace the three separate ones that were in use previously. I learned more about C in that short period of time than any number of books could have taught me…
It was also around this time that I got into playing tabletop RPGs - specifically the Star Wars d20 Revised system, for those interested in such things. I enjoyed the game, though I enjoyed a couple of the people less so. Among other things, I still found it difficult to tell what was banter and what was actual meanness.
After finishing college, I went to university for the first time. I was 21 years old, and I had received an unconditional offer from Huddersfield University. It was here that I was introduced to the Java programming language (which has thankfully improved a great deal since then) and to RPG systems not based on D&D. I didn’t even last a whole year before dropping out. It was one module: professional studies. It was the only module that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject itself, the first year of a degree doesn’t count towards the final grade (provided you fail no more than one module), and I found it utterly boring. So I barely did any work for it. As a result, I failed that module - the only module which (unknown to me at the time) I absolutely had to pass in order to continue onto the second year. Sure, I had one other assignment for that module, but since I would have needed to get 110% of the marks for it to pass the module overall, I had clearly failed.
So I stopped showing up to lectures and practicals, I didn’t bother doing the exams, and I just went back home; scared to even tell anybody how utterly I had just f***ed up, though of course I eventually had to. I worked at the restaurant over the summer, keeping up the pretence that I was going back to university that October, and then I spent a year and a half unemployed until eventually I got my old job back there. Most people who know me are aware that I have had problems with depression, and while I don’t know precisely when it started, I know that my disastrous first attempt at university did not help matters. What very few people know is just how bad it got. By 2012, I had forgotten what not being depressed even felt like. I didn’t seek help, even though I almost certainly should have, and if I hadn’t met a certain Welsh lass on New Year’s Eve, I would never have have applied to go back to university; I would never have left that restaurant that by this point I utterly loathed working at and there is a very good chance that I would have killed myself by now.
It also didn’t help that all of this was happening over the backdrop of my granddad’s dementia - by the time I returned to university, we were locking the front door and hiding the key at all times to make sure he couldn’t sneak out of the house - he still succeeded a couple of times, and while he was usually found safe and sound by the local police, one time he was found floating unconscious in a river by someone walking their dog. He went into a nursing home not long after I went back to university because looking after him was making my nan ill, and as of two years ago he no longer recognises any of his family. This may be a somewhat controversial choice on my part, but I have not visited him since then. There seems little point to it; he doesn’t know who I am, and within minutes of my departure he would forget I was ever there. Everything that made him who he was is gone, and I prefer to remember him as he was. If I am completely honest, I sometimes think it might have been better had he died in that river. Then, at least, we could mourn his loss and move on.
Of course, just because I have been working on one of the underlying causes of my depression doesn’t mean that it just went away, even if it did lessen for a time. Depression is as much a physical illness as a mental one; it alters one’s brain chemistry and it has been shown to reduce intelligence over prolonged periods. The fact that I took so long to seek help, and the fact that that help wasn’t there when I needed it (in part because I lack the ability to easily describe my symptoms) has now led to a situation where I failed my final year - though thankfully I am allowed to resit for full marks instead of with a maximum of 40% - and I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do if I fail this one last chance at a degree.
Well, that took a turn for the depressing. Sorry about that, but I needed to get it off my chest. There is, at least, a more optimistic ending to this post: I have a better idea of the kind of help I actually need now, and I at least know why I have always been different from other people (and why they so often seemed so less accepting of that than I was). Also, I have a decent chance of succeeding in that degree (my previous marks mean that I am highly likely to get a 2.II overall), and my autism diagnosis gives me a good reason to give to employers as to why the result wasn’t better. As such, the future appears somewhat brighter now than it has done in a very long time.
Being serious about it though, I’m sure you know you’ll find some time if it’s something you really love and that will fire up the creative motor for converting into brass or pres, rhywbeth felly.
again when your confidence wobbles.