So, the journey to get here has not been easy. At all. My transcript clearly shows that there is a tale to tell, thus everyone who sees it looks up at me puzzled, and asks for the story.
It isn’t particularly new and perhaps not even particularly interesting. It is about a girl who was happy and loved without having to think about it. Take said girl out of sparkly bubble, place in an alien landscape without beaches, tropical weather, coconut trees or any other support structures. Watch girl stumble bewildered and hurt, learning how these aliens communicate, hoping that one day she will get it right and they will love her too. Perhaps if she wore the right clothes or gave the right compliments.
Girl, unfortunately, has too much pride to acknowledge that she is struggling and that sleeping 15 hours a day and crying inexplicably for the remaining 9 hours is not normal. Her dog dies. Each day of doing nothing, she becomes a bit more of a nothing. It takes about 18 months of lows and lows with a higher altitude before she wakes up and realises that somewhere along the way, she found a few people who see her as not nothing. And life has started to fill up with things that are worth being awake for. Including the ability to change from a degree she hates (Finance) to something more meaningful (Psychology).
Being a nothing shrunk down to occasional weekends of not being able to get out of bed.
And so the Girl become a functional adult. Most of the time. Enough of the time to get drastically better grades, just in time to scrape into honours.
