I wrote my Master’s thesis in three days, okay. I wrote 60 pages in three days, they weren’t that good, I mean I think the ideas in it were quite good, I’m very pleased with what I came up with, it wasn’t polished. I really could’ve re-written small sections of it to make it a lot clearer, there were some awful spelling mistakes and few things that just didn’t make any sense, but there, there were quite some hyper-productivity, okay.

The interaction between the manicness and the ADHD, so with ADHD there’s a stimulus component, like I will fall asleep in the middle of a conversation if it’s that boring, like my brain actually just turns off, the only other person I’ve ever met that does that was my grandfather, and he would fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, then wake up and then continue. He was just hilarious.

You know like my brain needs to be fed constantly. And so all these things are feeding my brain, it’s all great and then and it means that like I can just sit down and then just write something and it’s great and I send it off to someone, Wow it was great you know. And you know it’s just, it all works together.

And then, and then it, and then it all breaks. And then people are like, What happened You know my supervisor, they got me all this funding like every, everyone had massive expectations of my Master’s Thesis, there was this big craziness.

I was like, a sort of typical naive happy schoolgirl, I got on with all my work and sort of I was a model student, top of my class and things, and typical, the perfect daughter I suppose. But I got into the habit of sort of not doing my work and things, and because I stopped doing work, I got bored and sort of started looking at different things and so I suppose it was school when it was picked up because, you know all of a sudden I didn’t have the energy to do any work, and I couldn’t be bothered with it all. And so my grades were slipping and it was the teachers that picked up the problems initially, and they put it down to the parental difficulties because they were getting divorced and things, so obviously they thought well that’s the cause of it.

And so we went into some sort of family therapy kind of thing, which never works, ‘cos when you’ve got parents that are about to divorce, putting them in a room together and say, Talk, probably not the best idea. So it was sort of, it went on from that really, but it was initially the school that picked up on it.

Because of my behaviour changed straight away and I used to be a good student and I was getting into trouble, I was getting myself deliberately kicked out of lessons because I just didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be in the room with everyone else, I wanted to be somewhere else. And it got, at first it was sort of just one lesson every now and again, and it got so bad that I was being kicked out of pretty much every single lesson, for every single day, and obviously they’re going to notice, if I’m not in any of my lessons. And so it was the, the school that suggest that I got some kind of counselling sort of thing.

It made me feel disappointed in myself and that I’d failed myself, I’d failed my teachers, I’d failed the parents. And that just made me worse, it just made me feel a whole lot worse, and you know, then it starts the onward spiral of you feel worse so you do worse, and then as you do worse your expectations of yourself fail more and then you start going worse and before you know it, you’ve dropped out of college and you’re out of work and you’ve not got nothing to your name.

I want everything to be done right, and to my best ability, and like I said I got all A’s and A stars at GCSE, and then all A’s at A’ level. And just doing everything I do I want it to be done to the best of my potential, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to do that, and just with everything like, like the counsellor used to say to me, You, you see failure as a bad thing, whereas sometimes failure can be a positive thing. Like last year when obviously I didn’t enjoy, like, like my course, I saw that as a failure whereas she saw that as a positive thing because it gave me a chance to rethink and have another chance, whereas I, that was like the end of my world for that moment in time, because I’d failed and everything’s got to be like successful and an achievement and like done 100%.

I just feel like as well my little brother, like I always said I want to have independence so I can look after him, and ‘cos I’ve not got that independence it’s failing, and they’re like, No it’s not, you’re 18, 17, 18, how can you be independent at 17, 18. You’ve still got to be a child for your parents, and they’re not going to see that as a failing because if you, like if you’re going to university and it’ll give them opportunities in the future for you to look after him, so it’s not a failing. You are doing something successful at the end of the day.

But I mean I still am a perfectionist, I mean my Uni work like I will do it always to the best, and sometimes it does get on top of me like, I’m stressed because I know I’ve got four assignments before Christmas, and I want to get them done and, so I still have that, but I have a more, when I do get stressed instead of like it leading to being depressed sort of look at it more positive and find something else to do.

Because I couldn’t read and stuff, and I wasn’t as quick as everybody else I think that’s why they picked on me. But then when I was in year 2, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, which is why I was finding it difficult, they, they just think I was you know being stubborn or didn’t want to do it, and it wasn’t, I was eager to learn but I found it difficult to read, and you know, understand things. And then they tried me with these glasses with like a green tint you know, and then I was top of the class for reading, and they realised that my reading age was higher than my actual age.

Like I had the reading age, the reading age of a 14 year old when I was about 11. So, they, like realised then and I’ve, I never used to picked for reading in mass every week, and then my Mum spoke to them and said, Look she’s got her glasses now, and then I was picked a few times, and then I decided I didn’t like it anyway so. That was another thing they picked on me for.

And when I was in High School and I had my glasses on, the kids would be like, Oh Sir, she’s got sunglasses on, you’re not allowed to wear sunglasses. And the teachers didn’t believe they were for dyslexia; I’d tell ‘em, They’re for dyslexia, No they’re not; they’re sunglasses, take ‘em off.

I stopped going to lectures and stuff, just couldn’t manage it. Just drinking, by then it was like, Right I won’t drink till six, I won’t drink till five, I won’t drink till four, and it got to like 3 oclock and I was opening the first bottle and stuff, but

And then my second hospitalisation was for three months nearly and , I was supposed to be doing my dissertation and graduating that year, on the day that I was supposed to go to my graduation ceremony I signed on for disability living allowance, so didn’t get quite to wear the cap and gown and stuff, but a year later I went back and finished, but that was purely purely through the kindness of one of my teachers, who said, Don’t even worry, you don’t have to come to lectures, just turn the work in, there’s no deadlines. She was absolutely fantastic to me, and I ended up I got a first, so I was like really chuffed. But like it was because she’d given me so much leeway to do it. If it had to, if it had been re-enroll and go to lectures, no way I’d have managed it, no way, I was too all over the place, like, I was, my life was just completely chaos. There’s no other word for it, just absolute chaos, like, so I had to literally get stuff done as and when I had a few moments of sanity, you know like, before I got drunk.

The teacher I had though was really good, and I loved learning, like stuff, and I was really good at it as well.

How does it work?

They come to the house, every day for about an hour, an hour and a half and basically you do Maths and English ‘cos that’s the most important to do. You know and they test you first of all to see which subjects you need to be learning, and mine was Maths and English. And I’ve always been top set for English, and top set for science, so, it’s just Maths now that I’m still trying to come to grips with, I go to college now total maths, so.

Yeah. Was that difficult to kind of do the work when you weren’t in school, or was it easier?

It was easier for me to do it, to work without ‘cos I didn’t have all the distractions of thinking, Oh they’re gonna pick on me when the lessons over. You know I had the lesson, and then went and did whatever.

When I was discharged I went back to sort of my normal home life and my old school life, and because I’d missed so much work it turned out that actually I couldn’t really take the exams, having missed this big chunk in the middle. And so, you know before missing it I’d been not attending all of my lessons, so it was sort of a slow slope in and to get back into the life, the way I was doing it, I didn’t attend all my lessons just to sort of gradually go into in, and so I missed quite a big chunk of the year. And so we decided it would be better to sort of write it off and say, well that’s it, we’ll start again, and that was at the sixth form, and so in the September I started again here and it was completely different because just the way they treat you, they, whereas before I was continuing with people that, that I’d gone to school with and such, whereas here it was all new people, and they treated you as adults. It was, it wasn’t sort of assumed and you know, teachers on first name terms and things.

And whereas before it was saying Sir or Madam and it was, here was just a great change to be able to have that responsibility and to do my work. All the people that are here want to be here because, you know, it’s their education whereas the schools I’ve been before were just people being there because they had to be there. And so they didn’t work, they didn’t get on, and yeah, I actually love it here.

[Going to school] Horrible. I just used to think I used to walk into school and think that everybody would be looking at me and, I just, walking down the hallway and just get really paranoid and self conscious. And when I was at school because I had difficulties in understanding things, it’d just affect me then they used just like play off it in the classes because I couldn’t do the work cos I didn’t understand it. And then I’d get kicked out because I was messing about, but I couldn’t understand the work, so, it was just going around in circles really. And, so I never used to go to school, then I, then I had a meeting with the welfare officer and my Mum about how I could learn to go to school, and then they said that they was gonna put me on a half time timetable at school. I tried to do that and I still didn’t go, I mean I was only going like three times a week to school, I still wouldn’t be able to manage that to go in a group of like people and feel that everybody was looking at me, and, and then I’d, didn’t go to school at all.

And one thing no-one ever told me when I went to college is that so many people come as mature students, so many people take a gap year, then another gap year. Nobody ever, ever said to me about that, no-one ever told me about these foundation years, no-one ever tells you at college, you know you don’t have to do science A’ levels to do engineering, you can go off do several gap years, come back and do a conversion year and then do it. It’s all sort of like, it’s acceptable to do a gap year, but it’s really pushed when you have to do something like voluntary or a year in industry, which is fine, but it’s very structured like you must do A’ levels, you must go onto university or you know have a place waiting for you at university really.

And I suppose most people do that, but I think looking at my college and what I’d been through a lot of people don’t. I think sometimes it’s good to take a couple of years out. I regret not doing a gap year. I’ve no idea what I’d have done with my gap year, but I think it would have been useful to work, save up some money for university, ‘cos if I’m here for six years money is obviously a big issue, maybe not travelled but maybe worked for an organisation where I could have travelled, but on, in retrospect I can use this year, this is, I call this foundation year my branching out year, where I can try all these new things, and I will probably will work everywhere else, and it’s, it gets me to see what I want, so in some ways it is a gap year, so to speak.

Half the stuff was you know, first year stuff and I found that really boring, like I took philosophy because I thought it would be interesting, I’ve never done it before. It was moral philosophy and I felt like I was doing Christianity again and I could do it with my eyes shut. And that upset me and then other things were hard and I had to work at but I felt like I didn’t fit in again. I’ve not had a problem since I was in, the beginning of secondary school that I didn’t fit in, I had always fitted in since then. And it was horrible, and I just, well it wasn’t that made me not want to go to Uni, it was there were other aspects of actually start thinking about what I wanted from life and what I wanted to do in future years I’d probably never ever go for a career with a degree. And I would rather have those four years setting myself up for a better career practically than doing that. But I just hated it. I hated university [laugh].

So as soon as you left you felt so much better?

Oh, it was a weight off my mind, where I could just go to work and do something and I knew what I was doing every day and I knew I was gaining things from this and it wasn’t just a grade to kind of see how you were doing, but I could see the results of what I was doing every day, and I worked my way up and it was, it’s good. It feels good.