One day, after staring at an academic paper for three hours and writing nothing, I went to an employment adviser. He sent me off in a whole new direction
I expected to enjoy university, and when I didn’t I was knocked sideways. I should have done: I was academic, I loved knowing things and equally, I had always thought I was gregarious, and liked having fun. I didn’t think I was bad at making friends either. And indeed, I quickly found a small group of people I got on with. Yet despite all this, somehow I was plunged into a kind of despair I hadn’t experienced before – and haven’t been through since. I couldn’t work it out then, and I can only speculate on it now.
I suspect a lot of people thought it was all because of my blindness, but that’s because if you have a disability, people like to attribute anything that goes wrong for you to that. In truth, I don’t think it had much, if anything, to do with it. One possible explanation was the sheer size of the change in my circumstances. I had gone from an unusual, small and residential school, with just over 70 pupils, to a large, sprawling complex of colleges with about 10,000 students and staff. Everywhere you went was full of noise and bustle, and as everybody knows, you are nowhere more alone than in a crowd.
