University, Endings, and the Quest for a J.P Morgan Life Raft

Trigger warning for this one - I talk about my experience with an eating disorder.

My first attempt at university didn’t last long.

I moved into halls, attended lectures for less than two weeks, then packed it all in and went home. A real blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment for my academic career.

I'm not the only one who's left after two weeks, I know. I had my reasons.

At the time, my eating disorder had reached its peak. It wasn’t a good time. The illness had taken root, growing like Japanese Knotweed—fast, pervasive, and smothering my entire being. It thrived because I denied myself my basic needs over and over, again and again.

Each skipped meal was a small betrayal to myself.

In that state, the illness thrived off my self-hatred, rejecting everything that could bring me comfort—food, people, joy. It kept me isolated and completely detached. I was unable to connect with myself let alone anyone else or the world around me.

That leads us to the second point: I had no idea what I was doing there.

I was only at university because that's where I should be, not where I wanted to be. It's not as if I knew where I wanted to be either.

At school, the pressure had been on to know. Everyone around me had grand plans for their future while I felt lost and unsure. One thing had been certain though - I didn’t want to be left behind. So, I picked the first subject that sounded a bit like what I thought I wanted to do at a university that kept me close to home. Simple.

But as soon as the pressure to keep up with everyone else lifted, so did my energy to continue.

At the end of week one I spent a lunch break sitting across from the course leader, Jane, in her office—an absolute shrine to Diet Coke cans stacked precariously behind her desk. I sobbed uncontrollably in front of this kind stranger as she offered me tissues and a can which, even though it had an office-warm temperature to it, I readily accepted.

I got out in time, just before the tuition fees were paid.

Once I'd moved back into my parents' home, I spent the next 12 months clearing tables at the Debenhams Café (RIP) in Glasgow, trying to get my health back. I mostly buried the pain I had inflicted on myself. It seemed to work. I started eating again and began to heal my relationship with food through cooking and baking. Even though I continued to weigh everything and still had a lot of 'demon foods,' I didn't ignore stomach growls anymore.

By the end of that year, I felt physically and mentally ready to give university another go.

This time, I chose a biology course at a seaside university near my Granny’s old home. She had passed away (for real this time) by this point but I felt her presence in those little streets we'd walked together a decade before.

It was a fresh start in a familiar place.

True to form, I quickly made brilliant friends I’m still lucky to have around me.

I even found a new boyfriend. We met in a chemistry tutorial during our first year but, for various reasons, he had to move to another university by the end of that year. Looking back that relationship wasn’t the greatest time of my life. We had so much fun in the beginning - going on dates in restaurants around town and day trips to nearby coastal villages with beautiful beaches. But we were so different, and I often felt he kept me at arm’s length—like I wasn’t quite good enough to be fully let in.

He kept me hidden from his family for our entire relationship, which only fuelled my efforts to find a place in his world.

I allowed life to slip past while I stayed at home waiting for him to call, and cried myself to sleep when he didn’t. At the time, I couldn’t see how much that relationship chipped away at my confidence. I didn’t trust myself to ask him for more. To be let in, to be known and seen. Instead, I stuck it out, convincing myself that everything was fine and that we could work through anything to be together.

That I was lucky to be with him.

A few things happened in the summer of 2016: Lindsay Lohan tweeted 'thank you #fife' because they voted to remain in the EU, someone in town protested Boris Johnson at one of the graduation ceremonies as he watched his daughter receive her diploma, and my ex ended things.

All in all, a real mixed bag and a series of events I never thought would happen. At least we had Lapsley’s version of 'Operator' to see us through.

When he said he wanted to break up, I felt devastated. Less than three days later though, I'd done what any 22-year-old would do in that situation, I buried all the pain he'd ever caused me and went to the pub with my friends. I leant into the liberation I felt. Over time, that sense of freedom grew. Quickly.

My flatmate returned after summer and, before she crossed the threshold into our house, I pulled up my t-shirt to reveal the freshly inked outline of an elephant tattoo on my lower back.

No regrets.

The first term of my third year began and nothing lingered in the back of my mind anymore. I was single, at a healthy weight, learning cool things about animals, surrounded by my best friends, and working alongside them in a dingy popular pub. I went to dinner parties and club nights. On my way home I dropped into after parties with 120 people crammed into the living room and danced on the fireplace because there was no room to do so anywhere else. I went on dates with boys I met on nights out and swam in the sea beneath the stars. 

I made up for the time I'd spent crying on the phone because he couldn't make our next meeting anymore while my flatmates went out and partied. After nearly two years of trying to seek approval from someone else, I had finally started to live for myself —and I loved it.

But it wasn’t all peaches and cream. At the beginning of 2017, my friend group suffered the sudden and tragic loss of one of our members. To say he was larger than life would be an understatement. Australian, 6 ft 4", always taking the piss out of someone and due to be married to a beautiful local girl the following summer. I met him during the summer of 2016 when he worked at my favourite pub in town. We got chatting across the bar, and I soon became a regular and asked to stay back after closing for lock-ins. By the end of that summer, he’d not only offered me a job but also the automatic friend group that came with it.

I'll never forget my boss' face when he got the call. I'd just finished an eight-hour shift with a deathly hangover and had propped myself up against the bar, ready to eat the dinner I'd been looking forward to all day. I never took a single bite.

We were told he’d been killed a few hours before. He swerved off the road while overtaking and, because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt, didn't stand a chance. He died instantly.

Fucking idiot.

It felt weird to learn my friend had died while I was busy serving people food and drinks, complaining about how awful I felt because of the volumes of beer I'd consumed the night before.

The two weeks that followed were a blur—filled with the arrival of his family from Australia, endless amounts of drinking, and parties that lasted all night. We numbed our pain the only way we knew how—drunk and together.

But all too soon, life demanded things got back to normal. Even though the grief never left, the shock wore off and I pieced myself back together as best I could. Understandably, working at the pub never felt the same after that. I left at the end of the summer and threw myself into the mountain of work that was now piling up for my final year.

As the end drew closer I began to realise those moments that made up my university years could never be recreated. They were highly specific to the time, to the place, and to the people I shared them with.

And that terrified me.

Time flew by so quickly, and I often found myself overwhelmed by nostalgia, panicked at the thought of not being able to make those memories again, with the people I loved, in the place I called home anymore.

When conversations about the end of university started to happen, it felt like I was right back where I had been when school ended: lost, unsure, and unprepared for the future, but with an added layer of confusion. Because why was no one considering the most obvious option?

Why don't we all just stay there forever?

As if history was repeating itself, everyone around me began to reveal their grand plans —grad schemes, masters, career paths—while I had no idea what to do next. I’d picked biology because I love nature, but the thought of working in a lab for the rest of my life just didn't appeal. I wanted something stable that would see me through. To where? I don't know. Just through. 

One afternoon, following a coffee date with an exceptionally organised friend, I hurried home to begin applying for graduate placements. We'd been talking about her own with one of the 'big five' that was due to start in September and it sounded perfect to me. Okay, yes I had just found out what the 'big five' was but she had a sturdy life raft to carry her through the choppy waters of post-graduate life. Maybe—just maybe—I could get my own life raft. One with a sleek J.P. Morgan logo.

I snapped the laptop shut when I realised the applications for their graduate placements had closed a whole 7 months before. I was astonished at their organisation, it was an insult to the lack of my own!

I didn't even want to work for them anyway, which was true, but I was panicking. Hard.

I was searching for anything that had some steady sails.

Then, just before graduation, two alumni came to give a talk about their careers in natural history TV. They’d worked on Blue Planet 2 and were genuinely the coolest women I’d ever seen. They swept in like a pair of guardian angels—if guardian angels wore Patagonia jackets and dropped stories about filming humpback whale mass migrations. A few classmates announced they were going to pursue that path and I jumped on the bandwagon. 

In terms of security, this raft had a twig for a mast and a white handkerchief for a sail. But I didn’t care—I had a raft. And, if nothing else, mine was definitely the coolest raft, one that might sail amongst pods of dolphins.

Suck it, J.P. Morgan.

So, it wasn’t one big, obvious trauma that shaped the final years of my teens and early 20s. It was more than that—an accumulation of betrayals, big endings, and moments where I felt like the ground had shifted beneath me.

The bad times were quickly forgotten in the haze of the exceptional ones. That didn’t mean the pain they caused had gone anywhere, though, just that it was building up inside me.

So, when graduation came, we had one last party, and with a raging hangover, I packed up the place I’d called home for four years. I took the photos off the walls and felt an immense sense of jealousy towards the new intake of first years who were about to make their own memories in my town.

What I didn’t realise, however, was that I was also packing everything I couldn’t see—the self-doubt, the chipped-away trust, everything I hadn’t processed over the years. It was all shoved into a bag, ready to join me on my new adventure.

And, as it turns out, trauma doesn’t travel light.

It brings all its baggage with it.