3. Death: The end of an Oxford dream
A story about the narratives surrounding success we tell ourselves
Trigger warning: suicidal ideation, forced hospitalisation
“If it’s up to me or my tutors, I want to pretend that this was my decision. I want to suspend my studies at Oxford.”
20th November 2020 during the second national lockdown. A Zoom call with the Academic Registrar and Tutor for Welfare to confirm that I would be leaving. You have to say it explicitly.
There have been many days in the past where I thought I would just give in and die. The days of sensory and social hell that led to my autism diagnosis at 13 in 2014. The months that followed. That warm day in spring 2015 where I came to the cold realisation I was LGBTQ+ when I was already the weird disabled Chinese kid in a majority-white mainstream school. The first day of October half-term 2017, when I developed chronic pain. The many, many days where I’d do anything to make it stop for a single moment.
However, if I had to choose The Day where I’d say I died, it would be that day. Saying those exact words is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I could hear the moment my heart shattered. I didn’t think I would ever be able to put it back together again.
I was always the clever one. Able to get good grades with minimal revision. The insufferable smart-aleck who would immediately point out the teacher’s mistake (rest assured, I never asked for extra homework or earlier tests). Known for my academics even in high-performing schools. The day I got my A-Level grades, the first thing a good family friend told my dad was that she felt bad for my two younger siblings.
My intelligence came in handy: I was also always the troubled one. So shy at four that I slid under the table to avoid being seen by the teacher. Throughout secondary school, my attendance was under 80%, largely due to chronic illness. It was also partly because at 13, I was suspended from school for reasons relating to my autism.
People like me, who are Autistic or otherwise have low school attendance, don’t get five passes at GCSE. We don’t progress to sixth form, or emerge from it with qualifications. We don’t go to university, let alone Russell Group ones. We don’t get jobs — only 16% of British Autistic adults are in full-time paid employment, a figure which has remained static since 2007. It’s the worst of any minority group in the UK.
I wanted to break that narrative for myself.
I got 12 top grades in my GCSEs. Somehow, despite being in severe pain during my exams, I got 4 A*s at A-Level. On a gap year I took for my physical health, I worked an 8–5. Alongside that full-time job, I studied and got into Oxford for Chemistry.
I remembered thinking to myself that it was like a dream, too good to be true. Unfortunately, I was right.
On the first day of my first term of university, I got COVID.
I developed long-COVID so severe that I was involuntarily hospitalised twice. I’d never been hospitalised before. Now I was getting hospitalised twice in a week while in a new city surrounded by unfamiliar people. In the most isolating time too.
It was terrifying. I’d never been so scared before.
It wasn’t possible to stay. I was given a ‘choice’: say I wanted to leave myself, or have my tutors decide I was unfit to study and make me leave anyway. I opted for the former — I needed to pretend that I still had some agency over my own life.
That day, the person I was died. That person thought that he could break that narrative of failure and be conventionally successful. He believed that so long as he worked harder than everyone else, it would all be fine. Suffering now is bearable because the next stage of life will be better. Now I had definitive proof that wasn’t true.
If that person had the energy, he would have marked that death with his real one.
Over time, I realised that by trying to break that historical cycle of failure, I’d written myself into another ancient story.
I’m a disabled, LGBTQ+ person of colour. Being just one of those, I’d have to work at least twice as hard and be twice as good to be successful. Being all of these things, I have to do all of that tenfold. It’s not good enough to be clever. I have to be outstanding.
It doesn’t matter if I work myself to the point where I throw up from stress. It doesn’t matter if I’m unhappy. Even if I hate everything and everyone in my life on some level, none of that matters.
The only thing that matters is being successful.
Everything comes back to the stories we tell. It’s so difficult to break out from the role you’ve been cast in society and the role you’ve cast yourself in.
Even now that I’ve abandoned traditional notions of success for myself, I find myself playing out that same narrative in different ways. Sometimes by trying to one-up current university students and graduates, as if to prove my worth. Often by capitalising on my weird niche and flashy characteristics. Always by working myself hard.
I keep trying to break it. One day, I will succeed. Ironically, it will probably happen the day I stop trying so hard.
Now I can genuinely say I’m glad to no longer be at Oxford.
I’ve watched Oxbridge break people. Even outside of the bubble, many of my peers, who are just done their second year of undergraduate study, are planning on applying for Master’s courses solely because they don’t think they can compete against three years of recent graduates. My experiences on Avado’s FastFutures programme have shown me that more often than not, a degree isn’t at all useful in the workplace anyway.
I’ve changed. Because I’ve worked hard and been painfully honest with myself and the world, I’m going to be taking part in the alternative social enterprise Master’s course Year Here sans undergraduate degree in September. Now I do paid public speaking and writing work, even speaking at Autscape, Europe’s largest Autistic conference.
None of that would have happened if I hadn’t at least changed my ideas of success. Advocacy and social good is a new game with new players. I’ve always been greedy — I want a group victory.
Now I want to break that traditional narrative of success for everyone. There’s a new story that I want to write into existence.
On 20th November 2020, I wanted to mark that death knell to conventional success with my physical one.
On 20th November 2021, I want to mark that anniversary with a gathering of friends and a slice of cake from my favourite shop. It’ll be mundane and extraordinary all at once. Most importantly, it will recognise the moment where I broke away from the role that trapped me for the very first time.
