“Sometimes I think I’m not good enough for this degree any longer. Sometimes I think about dropping out of the course altogether. The last time I felt like that I was hormonal though. I’m so stressed about my social life at the moment. I just can’t find the time to see friends. My mum is on at me to go out more. She has very traditional views about marriage and thinks that, because one of my older brothers has recently got engaged, I should hurry up and get engaged too. She wants me to get married as soon as possible and have children. She’s worried that if my brothers have babies, she won’t get to see them as much as she would if they were mine because the wives will be closer to their mums. Thing is, I don’t want to get married and I don’t want children. I’m the youngest in a huge family – I’ve got three older brothers and my parents have loads of siblings each. When my mum was pregnant with me, she desperately wanted a girl after all those boys. I think the anxiety she felt during those 9 months somehow transferred to me, because I had real problems as a child. I was a selective mute. I had this vile teacher in Year R. If she asked me a question, I would whisper the answer to my friend and my friend would tell the teacher what I said. The teacher would then refuse to accept the answer via my friend and really lay into me, telling me she would only accept a spoken answer from me. She went on and on and that just made me worse. Other teachers spoke to me like I was simple. I stopped writing at school after that. I wrote at home, but in the classroom, I just wrote random letters. I grew out of the mutism in the end. I think I was about 8.”
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