I spent almost two and a half years at the University of Malta and as you can see from the title they weren’t the best years of my life.
I’m out of Junior College, hating school life and I’m already swept into a class full of blank faces. I started Uni, the so-called last stage before getting a certificate and working your arse off for the rest of your long life.
I was probably in the worst mental state of my life, I couldn’t get myself to do any extra work, and waking up in the morning was a chore in itself. I used to run from the bus stage at times just to make it a minute or two shy of being on time. I was in such a slumber that even my socialising skills were burnt to the ground.
Anyway, no real friends around even though there were some good people who gave me rides home and tried to help. The rest were strangers. Students who would copy off assignments from previous year students or one another. Some even signed off attendance sheets for friends who didn’t attend class.
Meanwhile, lonely me didn’t even have a chance of a humane discussion on our latest assignment with anyone. As time goes by I was giving in and started to spiral down in an even deeper depression. I hid into gaming while trying to forget the misery.
Through all this time of hardship, I don’t think anyone knew how beaten down I really was. I pushed away even the dearest of friends. My parents having marital troubles of their own never took a hard look at me and attributed all this to me just slacking off.
You can imagine I wasn’t the lecturers’ pet, and they made sure to make me feel I shouldn’t be there. One lecturer said:
“Only one person failed the last exam. I made sure that whoever deserved to pass, did so” and looked at me straight in the eye.
It was me. I had a mark of 44 out of the pass mark of 45. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. They clearly tampered with the results. I repeated my first year.
In my repeater year, I did better and thankfully I had some friends. I also developed a crush on a girl who was in a relationship, more soul-crushing stuff in that department.
To sum it up, Uni still felt like it wasn’t for me. My brain had always let me down.
The second year starts and I had the head of the Biology department come up to me in his car at the lecturers’ car park:
“You already missed two classes, if you miss another one, I’ll make sure you’ll fail on the next one you miss,” he said
“But I was sick, I have all the required doctor’s certificates,” I muttered shyly.
“Doesn’t matter, those are the rules. Miss another one and you’ll fail, ok?” he replied.
I nodded and he drove off. I knew that I didn’t miss classes out of the blue or posed as sick. At that time, we had a maximum of missing three lectures and I was threatened to fail after losing two with valid reasons.
This was done in the face of clear attendance abuses from my classmates. We had some lecturers calling out the names of people after signing the attendance and five or six people (from around forty) were all magically in the bathroom.
Back to me, I was certainly in the crosshair of my lecturers. After that, I started to crumble and gave up. I was done with studying and all of this crap.
A few weeks later, I applied for a full-time job and got it. Was like breathing pure oxygen into old smoker lungs. My mood changed, my life changed, for the better. I left University on a note of mental health issues but I was sure I wasn’t going back. That was the end of probably the bleakest chapter in my life.
Credits:
Featured picture: Pexels – Pixabay.
Words of Osiris 