On Being 'Differently Abled'...

I started writing this blog post way back in July, whilst sitting on a bed in Spain at 6am. I’ve only recently managed to finish it. Why was I writing at 6am, you ask? Because I couldn’t sleep. Why couldn’t I sleep?

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What is a ‘disability’ though, really?

                It’s only lately that I’ve felt strong enough to come out and openly talk about something that changed my life nearly four years ago – though it has actually had an impact on my life for longer – more on that later.

                In February 2014 I was diagnosed with a chronic muscular pain condition called fibromyalgia. It took a long time for the specialists to finally ascertain what I had, but the reality is that I’d had symptoms of this condition for many years.

                I’m not writing this post for sympathy. I would rather people didn’t know I had fibro to be honest, but I’ve realised that there are too many of us suffering in silence whilst pretending to be like everyone else or pretending that being ‘differently abled’ isn’t really as hard as it actually is… So I’m writing this for the other people out there that are ‘differently abled’. And maybe for others too, to understand what this is like.

                Why am I saying “differently abled”? Because that’s what I am. Even before I was diagnosed with fibro I hated that word, ‘disabled’. Dis-abled. UNable to do things. It suggests that people with conditions that limit them physically or mentally are incapable and incompetent. I beg to differ, and I have always begged to differ. 

“DIFFERENTLY” ABLED… NOT DIS-ABLED!

                I feel the Paralympics and other para-sport events remind the world every now and again what people that suffer from physical or intellectual impairments are truly capable of if they are allowed to shine. I speak as someone that has loved, followed and trained in athletics for several years: I have more respect for so-called “disabled” athletes than I do for able-bodied stars, though I do love my Usain Bolts, Mo Farahs and Jess Ennis-Hills. The determination and steadfastness that is required to compete in a sport like athletics is crazy. It gets even crazier when you want to be the very best and stay at the top. And then it becomes crazier still if you want to do the two former in addition to having a seriously debilitating condition which makes things x times more difficult.

                It’s crazy hard, but it’s possible. It’s just possible in a different way to what it is if your body and your brain work as they’re supposed to. If you have some type of handicap, you are not DISabled from being eligible, you are simply DIFFERENTLY equipped for the task. Equipped with less, sure, but still equipped nevertheless. You just have to do things in a different way.

                Personally I prefer the word that people used to use to describe people with ‘disabilities’: ‘handicapped’. It denoted that such individuals were limited in their abilities to do certain things, but did not rule out the possibility of them doing these activities.

                I’ve long been an advocate of people with ‘disabilities’. Side note: I do hate using that word, but until another word becomes available in the English dictionary I guess I’ll just have to use it! Based on that conclusion, I’ll stop putting it inverted commas from here on out – but that doesn’t mean I agree with the term! Siding with people that fall into that bracket just seems like the perfectly obvious thing to do as a human being! I believe people only become discriminatory towards people with disabilities when they begin to see them as less than people – and there’s no doubt in my mind that the language used to describe them plays a part in giving shape to this reprehensible mindset that some people seem to have.

                As a linguist it’s no surprise that I see the language we use as very significant in shaping our thought process, but really if you think about it, it does make sense. Think back to the days of outright and very nasty racism (I’d like to think things have improved, but we all know racism is alive and well – even if it is generally not as in-your-face as it used to be…) when people would regularly refer to black people as “monkeys” and “baboons”. Of course it helped justify racists’ treatment of them: if these human beings were represented in people’s minds as mere animals with no intellectual capacity, it became easier to rationalise treating them with no dignity – though, let’s be honest, in a lot of countries black people were treated A LOT worse than dogs. The same goes for this: ableist people (that’s the word we use to describe people who are discriminatory towards “disabled” people) often use: ‘You can’t do anything, you’d be better off dead’ as their rationale for scorning people with disabilities and denying them time and time again their basic human rights.

                You don’t need to look very far to see how badly disabled people are generally treated in daily life. Watch a documentary on someone with a life-threatening or life-changing condition which makes them visibly different to others and you don’t have to wait long before the sufferer talks about how they are often stared at, pointed at and maybe even spat at in public. You can read stories of how people have been denied access to toilets and so many other services simply on the basis that they look different. You see how people will assume they can’t do a lot of things without even asking them first.

 My Case

                That isn’t me.

                Fibromyalgia, the condition I have, isn’t a visible condition. You wouldn’t know I had it unless I told you. In fact, until not so long ago only a handful of my friends knew I had it. There are benefits and downsides to having a condition which is invisible. The benefit is I can generally pass as “being like everyone else”, and the downside is “I appear to be like everyone else”. Do you see, it’s a double-edged sword. People not knowing about my condition means I don’t have to face frequent and outright discrimination in public, which I no doubt would if I were in a wheelchair. It also means that when I go to an interview, no-one will assume that I’ll be unable to carry out my work and decline to give me a job as a result – because they simply won’t guess that there’s anything wrong with me.

                But it does mean that when the metro is full I have to stand, like everyone else, until a seat becomes available, because no-one will know that my feet hurt from standing. It also means that no-one will give up their seat for me in the way they would move to make space for someone in a wheelchair (as most decent people would).  I remember once when we were on the bus in Marseille and some old people came in. My family and I all had seats, but a couple of these men said that my brothers should get up because they were young and could stand. From looking at me, you might quite reasonably assume that I am young, fit and healthy and so should quite rightly stand and give my seat to someone older if the occasion arose. On this occasion my brothers got up and we found some seats elsewhere, at the back of the bus, but I do remember thinking on that day, what if that had been me? What if one day an OAP asks me to get up, or expects me to get up so they can sit down? I always move when I can, to sit elsewhere, because I respect the older generation and I like to make things easier for people whenever possible. But if there are no seats free and I know I will have to stand on my feet for another 20 minutes if I give my seat to this hypothetical individual (because this is all hypothetically speaking), would I be able to do that?

                OK, let me explain a little about fibromyalgia is and what it does to you.

                I’ve been having symptoms of fibro since I was nine in fact, but I only got diagnosed with it when I was eighteen. The symptoms I experienced for nine years were sharp, “shock” pains. They would run through my body at entirely unexpected times and they were – and ARE – excruciating. They were mostly intermittent, meaning I would get maybe one here and then another there over the course of a day – but sometimes I might have a series of them for up to half an hour, running through either one block of my body or just all over. They were – and ARE – horrible, and though I went to the GP on a few occasions as a child to get them checked out, the doctors simply didn’t understand what was going on. Eventually I just came to accept that I was going to have to live with this strange and bizarre pain that would shoot through my body and make me twitch and sometimes scream and wince in pain. They were the worst at school: you can’t just scream aloud in class, can you? And nobody could see what I could feel, so I would try and hide it. Sometimes people noticed, like when my leg suddenly moved as if from a spasm when I was sitting down. But most of the time I could cover it. I would just close my eyes extremely tightly together and pray for the pain to go away because I knew I couldn’t scream. People would think I was crazy.

                It was only at home that “my secret was known”, if you like. If I screamed I could explain it away the moment after by saying “I just had a shock”.

                We tried everything, trying to change my diet so that I would have more Vitamin D, taking supplements, drinking more water, nothing helped. The shocks have been part of my life for over a decade. I remember one thing that frustrated me was how everyone seemed to think they had the answer without having a clue. I recall one girl at school telling me with certainty that the pains I was experiencing were period pains, no matter how much I told her the contrary.

                That’s another thing: people that suffer from fibromyalgia frequently have horrible period pains. I know I do. It makes sense that sufferers of fibro tend to have really bad period pains, really. Fibro is a muscular condition that affects every muscle in the body, and sufferers often fall victim to other related medical conditions. It was a couple of months into starting my degree at Oxford that I started to experience its full-blown effects. (As a side note: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the intensifying of my symptoms occurred a matter of weeks into me starting at Oxford. You can read my series “Reflections on Oxford” series here.)

Living with Fibromyalgia

                It seems fibromyalgia is most common with women between ages 20-30, but it does affect men and those in other age groups too. Singer Lady Gaga and actor Morgan Freeman have both publicly come out and talked about living with the condition. I have, since I was diagnosed, met quite a few people who suffer from it.

                Fibromyalgia is a muscular disorder that leaves you in constant pain. Yes, I do mean that. I’ve spoken to quite a few friends who can’t understand how I can be in constant pain and still function. The pain is everywhere, but especially in my forearms, lower legs, and hands. On bad days (days when I have a flare-up and the symptoms become inflamed), the pain gets probably about five times worse than usual. This means my head is in awful pain, my back (gosh, everywhere!)… On those days I can barely walk or even stand. And if I manage to do either you can tell there’s something up with me.

                The intense, throbbing pain is especially worse when I’m in contact with anything. Which is, all the time, of course, as I can’t just hold myself in the air! So sitting down, standing up, lying down, kneeling… They’re all painful.

                Fatigue is also a major symptom of fibromyalgia. That means I’m tired all the time. If I don’t get enough sleep, I’m likely to have a flare-up the next day, which will affect my ability to achieve what I want to in a given day. Funny thing though, is, although I’m always tired, sleep disturbance is another major thing you have to deal with when you have fibromyalgia! So often I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep, even though I’m SUPER tired!! It’s very annoying.

                Some people use medication to cope with fibromyalgia. I don’t, because nothing has ever worked for me.  The strong medication I’ve been prescribed has either had no effect, or has made me feel super sleepy! (Not helpful!)

                Not much is known about fibromyalgia. Even though I was treated (given a personal physiotherapist and more) at one of the best orthopaedic clinics in the country, the best explanation I could get for why my body behaves this way is that I process pain in a different way, and in some people the pain receptors in the brain are more sensitive than in others. Thanks. (If any of my medic friends wants to do a thesis looking into possible causes of and remedies for fibromyalgia, be my guest!)

                I’ve become a lot better about telling people about my pain and being real about my limitations. When I first got diagnosed, I hated the lack of control I had and found it really hard to accept the limitations that this label and condition confined me too. Now I’ve realised that actually, not accepting this only makes things worse. It pushes my body into overdrive, and it’s not fair to not inform people that I work with that there are certain things that I just can’t do.

                Here are some examples of things that I find annoying and frankly, embarrassing – that fibromyalgia has done to change me and what I can do. Something as simple as opening a jar or a bottle is actually extremely painful. The pain is really bad in my hands, so whenever I have to clench my hands, I’m putting myself into extreme pain. (Or as the case may be, sometimes other people unintentionally put me into a lot of pain. A very firm handshake, for example, leaves my hand burning for the next two minutes.) That doesn’t mean I never open a bottle or clench my fist around a doorknob, but it does make those things harder. Sometimes I do ask someone else to do something like a new jar for me, because it’s just too painful. Especially on a day I’m having a flare-up. I love how people don’t berate me for asking their help with those things, but simply help with no qualms.

                Even until very recently, I didn’t tell members of my own family about the gravity of the condition I have, because I didn’t want to admit to how weak that could sometimes make me. I’m starting to be more honest about the fibromyalgia, and I think the transparency is only helping me.

                That said, I don’t tell everyone I meet that I have fibro. I like to be “like everyone else” sometimes, you know? I don’t feel everyone I spend a little time with needs to know what I have. The lifestyle that I currently lead is making that a bit difficult though: I’m touring Europe with a Christian drama company and we’re constantly on the move. As much as I’m enjoying it, packing up so often and spending extended periods of time with people can be quite tiring, and though I just usually say “I’m feeling tired” by way of an excuse to get some rest, that doesn’t quite sum up what it feels like for your whole head to be pounding and your legs to be screaming out and your body saying “Sleep! I need sleep!”

ABLE

                I wanted to write this post to make others that suffer in silence or feel inadequate because they have some sort of physical limitation, feel that they are not alone, and be reminded of their worth.  Also, I guess I wanted people to become more aware of fibromyalgia and to start to question our discourse on disability.

                Some people would call fibromyalgia a disability. I guess technically it could be defined as such, but I don’t like to put myself in that box, because as I’ve already said, I don’t like the word “disabled”. I also don’t think I can use language that sees me as having as many limitations as someone that is paralysed and in a wheelchair etc… I definitely have limitations and I guess the condition I have does influence my quality of life, but there are still lots of things that I am able to do that someone in a wheelchair cannot.

                That said, someone in a wheelchair can still have great quality of life – ask them! Life is what you make it, and I have decided that I’m not going to let fibromyalgia define me. I do like to show it who’s boss as often as I possibly can.

                I finished a degree, am now touring across Europe with a Christian drama company, have lived in four different countries, still pursue all my interests… Including athletics! Experts actually do recommend that those living with fibromyalgia do regular exercise to relieve muscle tension. It’s a double-edged sword though, because sometimes my body is too tired and I’m in too much pain to do exercise! Of course everything hurts, but if I simply thought to myself, “I’m in pain, I can’t do anything”, I WOULD LITERALLY NEVER DO ANYTHING. Welcome to being in pain all the time.

                However, over-exertion and stress do make fibromyalgia worse, so I have learnt to “pace” myself. That means when I know I need to stop, I have to be honest with myself and everyone around me and STOP.

                As a Christian I do believe in healing, but there’s no doubt that fibromyalgia has been a tough pill for me to swallow, and there are times when I’ve lost my ability to have faith that this condition will ever be a thing of the past. God is well capable of healing me, but He may choose not to. In the meantime, I am using every ounce of my being to serve Him and encourage others in a similar position to me that they can do it, too!

                I don’t really have anything more to say, apart from that I need people to know that no-one is DIS-abled. No-one is UNable to do anything. We are humans, we are all able to think and feel… Even someone that is paralysed has that ability. Nobody has the right to undermine anyone else’s quality of life or their worth. I feel an especial connection to the discourse on the “disabled” because I know that some people could look at me, as someone that lives in constant pain, and view my life as a not very fun one – yet I think I show them to be wrong! I’m pretty much always laughing, singing, and living life to the full! Despite the limitations that my body has placed on me.

                Actually wait, I do have something else to say – any “Christians” that go around telling people that have some sort of physical ailment because of some sin they have committed, PLEASE STOP. That is one of the worst things you can tell someone. We live in a broken world, and yes, sickness is a product of that, but to go around telling sick people that it is their fault they suffer in this way is not loving (and most likely not true!).

                To all of my readers who may be battling a debilitating physical condition, whatever it may be – visible or invisible – and/or the depression that is prone to come with it, know that YOU ARE LOVED, and you have so much to offer to society. You are strong, you are valued, and you are capable.

If you don’t suffer from a physical condition, good for you (I'm happy for you). Don’t forget how privileged you are in this regard. You have no idea how much I would give after four years of permanent pain (and lots before that) to just have two minutes of no pain. But even if I don’t get that, I will happily use my todays to give others hope for tomorrow. Don’t underestimate the power that you have to love people that society undervalues and remind them of their value and worth.

" You Are Loved".

All my love,

Ruth xxx

Reflections on Oxford: Conclusion.

               

I can and will never forget my time at Oxford. It was full of great times with friends, time spent learning from the best, time spent throwing myself into what I love, wonderful opportunities, inspirational people, time spent trying to achieve change for the better… But far too often my time at Oxford was eclipsed by feeling I wasn’t welcome, that things were far too stressful, and that my friends were being unfairly treated by the system.

                I look forward to the day when change will truly come to Oxford. But currently it seems still very far off.

                That’s why I wrote this post. I want Oxford to change. And I want people to know how much it needs change, and the change that it needs.

                That’s why I went back to my old school to speak to students about Oxford: I want to see people who have lived in the real world at Oxford. For only then will Oxford start to resemble the humanity of the real world. 

If you want to go back to the outline of posts on the series "Reflections on Oxford", click here.

Reflections on Oxford Series Part 8: Oxford and Mental Health.

I know so many people that have rusticated from Oxford. Some of them started out with me and are now a year or two behind me. Some of them would have graduated before meeting me if not for having had to rusticate.

By the time I got to second year, I was truly shocked by the amount of rustications I was seeing. I really just didn’t think it was healthy, or normal, that a university should have such a high concentration of its students intermitting their degrees because of mental health issues, typically depression and anxiety.

What is it about Oxford that makes it so prone to making people like this? Why is it that people that have soared seamlessly through the education system suddenly reach breaking point when they come to Oxford?

It is worrying to me, honestly. In fact, it is a big part of the reason that I knew I had to write this post.

Before I started at Oxford, an acquaintance from back home said to me, “Oxford has one of the highest rates of suicide in the country.” Not the most comforting thing to hear, to be honest – and I assured myself I wouldn’t let it get to me that much, but the reality is, Oxford has been known to and does break people that much.

A few weeks ago, I found out the real cause of death of someone who had been studying at my college. I had sung with my college choir at his memorial service, and I had always wondered sadly how it had come to be that a 23-year old with so much potential had just “died suddenly”, with seemingly no explanation.

I guess it must have been because an enquiry and inquest was still ongoing at the time that the truth was not disclosed to us, but it turned out that the highly gifted PhD student had committed suicide. By jumping in front of train.

Because it had simply become too much for him.

It may seem hard for others to believe or understand how you can get to this point, but honestly, having experienced the kind of pressure that I can imagine this guy was under, I can comprehend it.

The number of suicides that Oxford University has witnessed, in the last forty years alone, is scary. In my second year, two students committed suicide within three months of each other.

In many cases, rustication may help save a life.

Support and Rustication

                But is it always the best course of action?

                Believe it or not, I considered rusticating in those last two months of my degree. I’m glad I didn’t, though, especially in view of some of the horror stories I’ve heard!

                As I said, rustication is a common occurrence on university grounds. I’d say most people know someone who has rusticated. I knew many. Some of them were my close friends.

                In fact, in my first year one of my tutors suggested that I consider rusticating – not because of mental health concerns, but because I had recently been diagnosed with a muscular chronic pain condition which was making my life difficult. (That’s a story for another day.) I was adamant that I didn’t want to – I didn’t want to delay the course of my life, I just wanted to get through my degree in the normal time-frame.

                Come the stress of finals, I was prepared to make that sacrifice to get myself well again, but having been made aware of some things since then, I can’t be completely sure that it would have been better for my mental health and general wellbeing to take a year out.

                There are a lot of things wrong with rustication.

One thing I noticed quite early on in my degree is that rustication seemed to be pressed on people with almost no alternative. You’re struggling with depression?, it seemed to be, OK, just go away for a year and come back better.

Does that always work though, really?

If you’re going to tell someone to go away for a year so that they can manage their depression or anxiety, what are you going to do to ensure that they don’t simply come back twelve months later in exactly the same state – or worse?

Oxford seems to be notoriously bad at this. I can think of at least four people I know who have rusticated twice because of depression.

I think it’s safe to say, rustication wasn’t the cure for them.

In the past, rustication was seen as a punishment. It was complete suspension from one’s studies for a year. In that time, students could not come back to their colleges, not even to go the library or socialise with friends.

You’d think things would have changed, right?

Not so. Even though you are still enrolled on your course, you are not allowed to enter college grounds – so those books you might have been planning to get from the library so you could study in a less stressful environment? You can’t get them.

Get this: at some colleges you are seen as so much of an emblem of shame that when you rusticate, you have to leave through the back gate. You can’t even take all of your things in one go. They have to be sent to you. I have read stories of students who were effectively forced out of college against their will because the college decided it was in their best interest to leave. As in, they found out the day before, You’re leaving, bye. Read more here.

How is that supposed to make anyone already struggling with mental health feel any better?

                I’ve read about and seen first-hand people who have been pushed out of college because they’re told they’re disrupting other people’s studies. One of my friends with a medically-certified physical condition was told by the Senior Tutor that she was “making it all up” and that it was “all in [her] head”. How would that make you feel? She was told that in me, as her friend, willingly helping her out and looking out for her, she was distracting me from my studies. I was infuriated.

                Some colleges have amazing staff that truly care for the welfare of their students. The welfare officer at my college is brilliant – so brilliant that the whole JCR voted to get her a special present to thank her for all she does/did for us! Others don’t. And sometimes there’s a mix of staff that care and staff that really don’t care.

                At some colleges, believe it or not, they have – or had until very recently – photos in the porters’ lodge of all their rusticated students. It was like an FBI most wanted list. If you had the face of one of those people on the wall, you were not welcome on college premises. Come on, is being ill a crime??

                Lots of people come back in a worse state after rustication. They have felt completely isolated during their year away, by virtue of the way they have been treated by their colleges, and are now in a new academic year where they have to make new friends. One girl talked about how, during her year away and afterwards, she had to deal more with the trauma of rusticating than actually dealing with why she’d been rusticated in the first place.

Oxford is not good at dealing with mental health. Because if it were, things like this wouldn’t be happening.

But these initiatives simply aren’t enough if the colleges, who have the most power, continue to be led and handled by people who couldn’t care less.

We also need to question what it is about the Oxford environment that takes people to this unhappy place so frequently. Rather than simply supplying support for cases of inevitable depression and anxiety, Oxford could deal with the root causes of their depression and anxiety.

For many, a real sense of unhappiness and isolation comes from being made to feel unwelcome. Unwelcome because of their cultural background, unwelcome because of the colour of their skin, unwelcome because of the way they speak, unwelcome because of their gender, unwelcome because they have a physical condition that limits them, unwelcome because they are struggling with mental health… This sense of isolation that so many feel has a lot to do with the university’s failure to truly expand into all echelons of society. If Oxford didn’t look so homogenous, those that don’t quite fit the general mould wouldn’t feel so disenfranchised. Though the university prides itself on saying that it offers lots of bursaries and has a great access programme, the things that I’ve mentioned above that make it so emblematic of elitism do put many people that are cut off from this privilege feel marginalised.

             We also have to consider how Oxford’s toxic pressure-cooker environment can take people to breaking point. The terms last only 8 weeks, yet in that time the average Oxford student does more work than some people might do in two 12-week terms. The intensity of an Oxford term even means people regularly talk about “5^th and 6^th week blues”. It’s talked about as though it’s a given that during an Oxford term you will get unhappy, extremely drained and fed up. It is not normal that unhappiness and stress should be so much a part and parcel of your degree – at least, almost nowhere else.

 I talked about the amount of work that we had to do with my fellow linguist friends after our finals and we realised that out of all the books we had to study for our Final Honours School, we could only be examined on about a third of them. So why did we have to study that much? Some say, for the pursuit of knowledge. Look, it’s great to learn, but when it means that the amount that you are learning consistently makes people feel overwhelmed and not only unable to continue with their studies, but with their lives, I think we should start to re-examine how high on the priority ladder we are placing “the pursuit of knowledge”.

Change really needs to come to Oxford, and fast. We can’t afford to have more lives lost or afflicted in this way.

Click here to continue to the conclusion...

Reflections on Oxford: Conclusion.

Reflections on Oxford Series Part 7: Finals.

                          Strong men tremble when they hear it / They’ve got cause enough to fear it!

                - Bill Sikes, My Name, Oliver!

Finals. I had heard enough about them in the three years before I had to do them, and seen people crumbling under the pressure they brought. I took comfort in the fact that I could do three-quarters of my degree without having to engage with them. I waived them at every opportunity between 2013 and October 2016. And then finals came knocking at my doorstep.

And Ruth Akinradewo turned into a different person.

Never have I ever experienced so much pressure and stress, and I have promised to NEVER again do that to myself. For my sake as well as the sake of the people around me who know and love me.

I’ve poked fun at it, but honestly, stress in Oxford is not a joke. And finals – the final examinations in which all the skills and knowledge you’ve accumulated in the years of your degree to date are really put to the test – take that stress level to an all-time high.

I got to repeating a mantra to myself in my final year as the pressure in the pressure-cooker got to an unbearable degree: Oxford, you did not bring me into this world and you will not take me out.

I posted it as a Facebook status on a day I was particularly feeling the pressure, and I think it made a lot of people laugh – and honestly when I had come up with that declaration it had been in part jest, but as things got more and more intense it really became less and less of a joke and a real, simple way of talking sense into myself when I felt like I was losing my senses.

I’m a Christian and so I believe that Jesus has the answer to all of my struggles and in Him lies the solution to allay all my fears. Yet I knew that I was going to need to be reminded of this a LOT more than usual to get through finals in one piece. Consequently, I had posters all over my wall with some of the key verses to remind me of God’s peace. And I STILL fell apart.

It seemed ridiculous, really. So many times I had to talk to myself and say, “Ruth, look, you’ve been through this and this and this, are you really going to let Oxford break you?” No matter how hard it could be, Oxford did not give me life and so it wasn’t going to take it from me. My life wasn’t going to fall apart because of Oxford. It really wasn’t that deep.

That’s what the theory was. In practice, it was pretty hard to exercise calmness and faith and all that good stuff.

I had fourteen exams. Fourteen.

Four in the first week of final term, and ten more over a two-week period in the fifth and sixth week of term. On top of that, in the previous term I submitted two near-8,000 word dissertation-like projects – on the same day. It’s not hard to see why the pressure got to me and got the better of me.

You speak to any Oxford graduate about finals and they will tell you they were intense.

Pressure and stress took different forms for different people. In my case, it made me withdrawn, pretty low, indecisive, anxious, an insomniac, unable to see the bigger picture, work-obsessed. I use the expression “I nearly killed myself” in more than one sense.

As someone that is usually upbeat, cheerful and a laughoholic, this version of myself couldn’t really be more different to my real self. For some time I hid myself away because I felt like I was supposed to have it all together. As the Christian, wasn’t I supposed to be showing everyone else how to do finals whilst balancing green tea on my head, living in a haze of peaceful serenity whilst everyone else was tearing their hair out? (I may do a post about struggling with depression as a Christian another time.)

I don’t think the stress of finals being the straw that broke the camel’s back was about me not being Christian enough. I think it revealed the tension at play between being human and doing Oxford finals.

This just wasn’t normal. I was someone who had gone through 10 GCSEs, 4 A-Levels and the AQA Baccalaureate, and numerous music and drama exams. I had done Prelims in my first year as well. Coping with exam stress and pressure wasn’t new to me. But I had never reacted like this.

After handing in my two big projects, I took one day off and then threw myself into revision for my finals. I was two weeks into the Easter break but I decided to stay in Oxford to revise to optimum level.

Those 2 big projects - done!

The first two weeks went really well. I enjoyed re-reading the books I’d enjoyed in my second year, getting to read them without the thought of having to write an essay on them imminently.

Then I don’t know what happened. Well, actually I do. I started suffering from a serious case of anxiety.

            There were too many books! How was I going to get through all of these works of literature in the six weeks I had left? And know the quotes by heart, the themes at the flick of a light switch? And Dante, DANTE...

Dante = Italy’s answer to Shakespeare.

My my, another reason doing Italian added to my struggles.

Dante Alighieri, frankly a brilliant poet, should rightly be studied, I’m not disputing that. His Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) is an awe-inspiring work made up of three volumes: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, documenting his vision of realms of the afterlife.

But do I regret that we had to study three 700-page volumes of medieval Italian? Yes. Yes, yes, and yes. When I picked the module that celebrated the greatest of Italy’s writers, I thought about how I would be studying some of the most influential literature in Europe, and at that, literature that celebrated God and Heaven. Plus to be honest, it was clear that all the Italian tutors wanted you to pick it.

Did I think about how I was going to have to revise all of it? No. Did I think about how I was going to have to translate medieval Italian in my exam? No. Did I think about how I was going to have to learn line-by-line verses of ancient Italian? No.

My mum thinks it was Dante that really submerged me in panic. Maybe so: there’s no doubt that having three volumes of 700+ page works in medieval Italian was not exactly a recipe for tranquillity.

BUT… There are people that never had to read Dante that can relate to my experience of anxiety.

After two weeks of my revision going well, I became unable to sleep. It’s true that I have struggled with sleep disturbance in the past, but this was quite different. Night after night, I would get no more than 2 hours’ sleep – not because I had gone to bed at 4am, but because I was lying in bed consumed by stress about work and exams and my mind simply would not go to sleep.

The sleeplessness was probably the biggest battle during finals. I was already waking up at 6:30 to start work latest by 8am, and ending my working day at 10pm. I was working all day. To be honest, I quite relished the idea of sleep as a way to get away from the constant slog of work. And now even that was being taken away from me?

And of course, when you don’t sleep well, you don’t work well. I found myself falling asleep at my desk during the day because I was tired. Then I would feel I had to do more work because falling asleep wasn’t factored into my schedule!

                I more or less stopped having fun because of my finals. I stepped back a little from choir, I stopped going to my church’s weekly student nights and just went to church on Sundays, I completely stopped athletics in my final year… I’m not saying that it wasn’t sensible to scale back some of my activities to give myself more time to revise, and make sure I wasn’t spreading myself thinly between too much but rather giving more to what I could manage at a particular time, but the sense of wanting to do well meant I really couldn’t see further than my finals. My wellbeing was suffering.

                The irony is, all the wanting to do well and worrying about not doing well enough, was stopping me from doing well! Worry and anxiety of this nature consumes you and actually massively destabilises and even paralyses you. As a result, I would sit in the library from 8-10am staring at my books and my notes and not making any sense of them, or barely writing three sentences on my spreadsheet.

                The change in me was so apparent to my mum, my friends, my pastors and my tutors that they stepped in in full force to do whatever they could to help. I really couldn’t have gotten through it without them. I got on my own nerves with the state I was in, so I don’t know how they managed to deal with me as kindly and understandingly as they did.

I wasn’t planning to go home until Easter weekend, but my mum got me to come home THREE times in the week before then because I really needed some help. I was being so irrational. I remember when I got home, saying to my mum and one of my friends over and over again, “I’m gonna fail. I’m gonna fail.” The reality is, that was completely untrue – despite how badly my revision was going, my results in mock exams a couple of weeks later were still far from fails.

My experience is not that different to a lot of finalists.

We all knew how awful finals were and mutual support and encouragement came through then like no other time. Every time you met a fellow finalist, you would boost each other by saying: “You can do it, I believe in you! We can do this!” (Because of course you had to encourage yourself as well.) One of my friends and I, having a particularly rough day in the library, joked that we could make a mixtape of the amount of times we’d sighed! Every time the other sighed and put her head on the table in total despair, the other would say “Are you OK?” and then after lamenting together for a few minutes, we’d pick up our pens and start working again. You saw the best of humanity and people coming together during finals, honestly. We were all carrying the horrible burden together.

               Every single one of my friends, from what I can remember, turned into a different person over finals. Many of us struggled with insomnia and had to get prescribed sleeping tablets during exam season in order to be able to rest. Even with my sleeping tablets, I was sleepy in more than a few of my exams.

Angst, irritability, depression, indecisiveness, frustration, panic… I mean, it was different for each person but generally finals weren’t the happiest times of our lives.

See how happy I was post-exams??!

Oxford finals can actually get so unbearable that year in, year out, a large number of people decide to rusticate. Actually, this doesn’t just happen before finals, but can happen at any point during one’s degree. Rustication is when a student takes a year out of their degree for health reasons. It can be because of physical health, but more and more frequently now it is linked to mental health. I heard twelve lawyers in my final year rusticated in the two weeks before their nine exams, because it was just getting to be too much. 

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Part 8: Oxford and Mental Health.

Oxford Series Part 6: The Work.

THE WORK.

                Ah, you didn’t think I would forget to tell you about this, did you?

                One simply cannot talk about Oxford without talking about THE WORK.

                I actually really enjoyed my degree. I love languages, and I chose the right subject for me. I loved studying something that I was passionate about, and to which there was a limitless scope of knowledge. I could never know or understand everything about French or Italian grammar, but I could keep learning more about them both with each day and expanding my vocabulary of, and familiarity with, the two languages.

                Does that mean I didn’t have moments of frustration, stress and “Why did I choose this degree?!” Absolutely not.

Course Content

                My biggest and most recurrent frustration and regret with my degree was that I chose to do French and BEGINNER’S Italian. I nearly dropped Italian MANY times in my head. By the third day of the week-long pre-sessional course that we ab initio Italian students had before starting our degrees officially, I was in tears and telling my tutor that I wanted to drop Italian. In my by then eleven years of studying French, we had never even had to learn how to conjugate the past historic tense because it is rarely used, and typically in very formal written registers. But three days in, when I didn’t even properly know colours in Italian, we were learning the passato remoto! It seemed I had bitten off more than I could chew.

                It is a testament to the endless encouragement of my Italian tutor and my mum that I kept going with Italian. I had MANY days in the first year of my course of being given back translations into Italian that I had toiled over for pretty much entire days, with markings and corrections EVERYWHERE. Amazingly, by the end of my second year I was getting firsts in some of these same tasks. Miracles do happen.

                I enjoyed the fact that I could choose what interested me the most within my subject. I loved translation and postcolonial literature, and I got to specialise in both of these areas in my final year.

                I only have a few criticisms of course content in my languages degree. We could have had more speaking practice. In our first year, we had almost no time devoted to oral practice of our languages. As a result I lost a lot of the confidence I had developed speaking in French at school. (I couldn’t speak Italian yet so that doesn’t count, LOL.) I would go so far as to say I spoke better French during my A Levels than I did in the first couple of years of my degree. It took my year abroad to give me back my confidence.

                Another thing I would have to say is that the curriculum was skewed in one clear direction throughout. Most of what we studied was written by old, white men. Nothing against that social group, but I don’t think they are the only group worth studying. And that was the impression you might get doing not just a language, but probably any, degree in Oxford. The first-year course is mandatorily the same for everyone, and for us Frenchies there was only one woman writer. They’ve since changed the course but sadly, even though they changed the work to be studied, there is only one female writer. Why is it that writing by females is marginalised to the point that two completely different writers have to be substituted for one another, because they cannot co-exist on the same course?

                We also didn’t study much from writers of colour. In our first year (for French), we studied a piece of postcolonial literature from a Martinican writer. In Italian, you could easily go through your whole degree only studying literature from white writers. Because I am interested in postcolonial literature and the relationship that European nations have with their former colonies, I asked to study two writers of mixed Italian-Ethiopian and Italian-Somali heritage. Not many people even know that Italy had colonies, because it’s not talked about. No colonisers treated their colonies well, but Italy was particularly terrible. My tutor was impressed that I had made the effort to study something different to what people usually picked, and he said after thinking about it, he was seriously going to consider putting postcolonial literature on the course.

                I’m glad. The course was too monolithic for my liking. 

Stress

                I never used to get as stressed about work as I began to be once I started at Oxford. I think a lot of it boils down to the feeling, “I’ve gotten into Oxford. That means I’m meant to be among the best in the world at what I do. I need to prove myself worthy of getting here.”

                I have a vivid memory of working on my first official assignment once I started my degree. It got me all into a fluster. I started shaking and more or less having a panic attack. Now, this was out of character for me. The particular task I had been given I had never had to do before and I just wasn’t sure I was going about it the right way. I have no doubt that the reason I got so fretful over it was that I felt I was supposed to know what I was doing: You’re in Oxford, aren’t you, Ruth? You should be able to do this.

                I ended up emailing my French tutor with my concerns, and was quickly assured that I was going about it in the right way. When I got my results, it was clear I had nothing to worry about.

                But knowing we’re capable doesn’t stop us from worrying and stressing over things, and just plain old feeling the pressure.

                Every Oxford student knows a little something about stress.

                Many Oxford degrees revolve around LOTS of reading, and LOTS of essays.

                My degree, this is true – even ask the medics and lawyers! – is widely regarded as one of the hardest degrees to do in Oxford. A languages degree is not easy anywhere, of course… But in Oxford… I kid you not, I assembled the total number of books I had studied for my final honours school – meaning the second and fourth year of my course and not including the first year – and it totalled a whopping FIFTY-FOUR!!! That’s fifty-four books in a foreign language, not to talk of all of the critical reading that we would have to do. And of course, reading in a language that is not your native tongue takes longer – you have to check words up in the dictionary and sometimes re-read things because you don’t understand the syntax, etc...

All 54 of the books that I studied in my second and fourth years for my FHS. (!!!)

                In our first year we would study one book in each language every two weeks, and write an essay on some aspect of it for a tutorial.

                In our second and fourth years we would have to read about three books for one essay. And noo, these were not small 100-pg novels. Sometimes they could be up to 600 pages. 

                It’s not hard to see why the term ‘essay crisis’ is widely-used in Oxford. You don’t even have to explain what that means to anyone, they totally get it, because the likelihood is, they’ve been there before.

essay crisis: n. Oxford University

a term used to describe the overwhelming stress of having to get one’s essay done for a tutorial in a few hours.

An essay crisis usually consists of the following:

1. Knowing you need to get your essay done and emailed to your tutor that evening, and in the morning you haven’t even finished the books yet. Because, don’t forget, even if you know what’s happens in the book, you still have to have fish out for relevant quotes from the experts, and to do that, you have to read the critical works and journals as well!
2. Waking up at ridiculous o’clock to try and get your essay done in time. For me this sometimes meant just not going to sleep the night before, which was stupid, but sometimes I didn’t really have a choice. (FYI, I wasn’t a procrastinator, I just tried to do everything and sometimes forgot that I’m A HUMAN BEING and can’t go to every fun evening event for every society I’m part of and still get all my work done.)
3. Removing yourself from all society and typing in front of your computer in a frenzy all day. Usually for me, this was in my room, as I tended to work better there, but many essay crises occur on a daily basis in libraries across Oxford.
4. Potentially working through the night. Oh, the days when I stayed in the library till 3am as late evening turned to black night, everyone left the library and I was the sole person there working on the three commentaries our tutor had set us for ONE tutorial! (That was one crazy term.) – Depressing.
   
   
5. Eating lots of crackers and crisps because you don’t have time to cook.
   
   
6. Not even having your shower and getting dressed until the work is done. Actually, I have one friend who was known for just not showering at all and going straight to his tutorial after having finished it a few minutes before!
7. Checking your word count every 15 minutes to see how close you are to the 1,500-word minimum.
8. Managing to write 2-and-a-half pages in a little over 2 hours or less, when somehow if you had more time you might be working on the same essay for a day and a half.
   
   
9. All culminates in the joy of finishing the essay. Like no other. Usually gives way to, “Ah, I’m free! Now I can go to sleep.”

Sure, then, you could go to sleep, but you knew you couldn’t for long because – hey, there was still more to do! As well as at least one tutorial a week – and sometimes I did have two tutorials in one week because of weird arrangements, so potentially two essay crises in one week – not fun… I would have to do a piece of Italian prose (translation into Italian from English) every week, French prose every other week, a translation from Italian into English every other week, and a translation from French to English also once a fortnight. Then an essay in Italian once a fortnight and the same for an essay in French – plus learning lots of vocab, practising inexplicable grammar, preparing specific things for speaking classes… Plus of course you had to go to the lectures, actual classes, tutorials and read your books.

No doubt though, pretty much everyone I know has sat in a tutorial talking about a book they haven’t completely finished. Oh yeah, it totally happened to me. Try as you may, getting through the equivalent of 3600 pages of foreign language text in two weeks is hard for anyone. Basically, you quickly learnt the skill of knowing how to talk about your books in an intelligent way with very little knowledge. Getting an overview of the general plot of the book and getting to grip with its main themes usually sketched out the outline of the essay for you, and you could throw in a few relevant quotes from the bits you actually had read to bolster your ideas.

Do you know what one of the most exciting prospects for me was as I prepared to go on my year abroad? Not just, oh, I’ll get to live in sunny places and experience other cultures and speak their languages – but oh my gosh, I’ll finally have the time to read all these books!!

Ha. I was wrong: I worked full-time on my year abroad so I actually didn’t get as much time as I had imagined, studying in depth all the books I’d had to race through over the past year and getting through the ones I was to study in my final year. However I know I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. In fact, I have friends that finished their degrees a year ago that are now relishing properly reading all the books they only managed to skim over during their Oxford degrees.

I do think it’s sad that the amount of work takes us to that point: where you actually can’t fully enjoy what enthralls you about your degree because you have to rush to get the next essay done. I mean, I do like the fact that an Oxford degree pushes you to be the best you can be: I have friends that did degrees which only called for one essay a term, and though that would make for a much more relaxed life, I don’t feel that would really be pushing myself – and if I’m paying £9,000 a year for my degree, I’d quite like to be able to get as much teaching out of it as I can.

My mum said it as I got into the throes of finals stress in Oxford, and I concur: You can’t survive an Oxford degree unless you love what you’re doing. For an academic course to take that much out of you and for you to keep going, you must have a real in-your-bones passion for it. Because most guys or girls would break up with a human being that put them through as much stress as an Oxford degree.

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Part 7: Finals.

Part 5: Sub Fusc and Other Weird Oxford Traditions from the Medieval Times

Oxford is a strange place.

                It is not at all out of the ordinary to see monks walking around Oxford. Catholic monks dressed in long white robes and sandals. First time I saw it I did a double take, like Did I just get transported into another century? But after a while I got used to it. A neighbouring student building, St. Benet’s, has a live-in monastery for Benedictine monks.

                I kid you not: one of my friends once saw a group of them SPEAKING IN LATIN to each other in the street. In Latin. In 2017. Need I say more?

                If you ever wished you lived in the medieval times, Oxford is the place for you.

Matriculation

                When you first get inducted into the University of Oxford, you go through this weird ceremony. It involves you wearing this.

Little Ruth at matriculation, taken on the terrible camera phone I had at the time

                This is not a normal outfit. What is this stupid gown that has flaps on the sleeves? If I wanted to look like an idiot, I would have said so. But at least for matriculation, you all look like idiots together, so it isn’t so bad.

                It’s quite fun for all the city residents and tourists though, to see a few hundred young people walking through the street looking like that.

                Matriculation is mandatory and from what I remember it cost about £30 or so for the complete outfit, known as sub fusc. The commoner’s gown, the mortarboard – which, incidentally, you are not allowed to wear until you graduate (stupid!), but need to carry with you at all times – and the velvet ribbon. That’s for the ladies: the men had to wear dark suits with white bow ties and the gown on top. There were also scholar’s gowns, which looked much nicer, but cost about two-thirds more, so even though I could really have gotten one as I was a choral scholar, upon being told it was more for academic scholarships, I decided I’d keep my money.

                What happened in the matriculation ceremony, you ask me?

                A lot of bowing, and many words of Latin were released into the air to deaf ears. (Because again, we’re not fluent in Latin.)

Sub Fusc

                We’ll come back to the university’s obsession with Latin later.

                Now, let’s talk about exams and how strange Oxford makes them.

                Forget about the fact that we call mock exams ‘collections’. I have some even weirder info for you. You know that weird uniform I was just telling you about which consists of us looking like bats? Well, we have to wear that for our exams.

                At any other university – for goodness’ sake, even Cambridge has ditched this odd tradition! – you go to your exams wearing whatever you want. You ought to feel relaxed in what you wear, seeing as you feel tense and angsty in every other aspect of your being, right?

                Not if you’re in Oxford. If you’re in Oxford, you have to wear your sub fusc to a tee.

                You have to wear tights with your skirt, or black socks which cover your ankles if you’re wearing trousers. Yes, even if it’s 28 degrees. And you have to wear your stupid black gown on top of your white shirt. And you can’t take it off until you get into the exam hall. So there you stand sweating. I feel especially sorry for the guys, considering they have to wear their dark suits as well!

                And thou must not forget the mortarboard, the square hat that you’re not even allowed to WEAR! Because of course, if you don’t wear it, you are not dressed in full sub fusc, according to university guidelines. Guess what, heading down to my exams, having managed to get myself relatively calm, I had to run back to my room to get my mortarboard because I didn’t want to risk not being able to sit my exam because I didn’t have a stupid hat I couldn’t wear with me. I mean, it doesn’t get much more ridiculous than that. (But once I realised, and I really couldn’t be bothered to go back, so I didn’t! Shh, don’t tell – they never noticed.)

                I’ve heard that people that are not wearing satisfactory socks have been turned back from their exams because they were deemed to have been dressed inappropriately.

                Do you know, twice in my time at Oxford – in my second year I believe, and again in fourth year, there was a vote at the OUSU Council on whether or not we should keep or get rid of sub fusc? And BOTH TIMES the majority voted to keep it. I just don’t get it. There were so many good reasons to get rid of it: improved comfort; less stress; money saved; no reinforcement of ancient elitist Oxford culture which so many people feel left out of… but it still won. I think that says a lot about who still runs Oxford.

                Oh and of course, there are the carnations.

                There is a long-standing tradition in Oxford that on your first day of a set of exams, you wear a white carnation, pinned to the lapel of your gown. Then for all consecutive exams, excluding the last one, you wear a pink carnation. And then, for glory day – the final day of exams, when your freedom arrives – you wear a red carnation. This tradition is so commonplace in Oxford that the florists sell carnations in a special pack of three with a dressmaker’s pin especially for Oxford students.

A very happy Ruth on the last day of her Prelims (first year exams)

                They say it’s not compulsory but I’ve heard that the only reason some invigilators will allow for why you don’t have your carnation on is it that you have hay fever. Seriously?? As if actually sitting your exams and knowing your stuff wasn’t stressful enough, you have to worry about whether or not you have a carnation, whether it’s the right colour, and whether or not it is alive or dead when you pin it on. And then you have to worry about keeping it on. Worries I could do without on exam day, I reckon!!

                I really didn’t care much for the carnation thing. Once I’d got my carnations, I made them last even if the petals were curling up and turning brown and the stem was starting to go mouldy. (I’d just trim off the over-moist bit.) I’d much rather spend my time revising my quotes than walking 15 minutes to the florist for something as superfluous as a carnation! Also, my carnations often fell off on the way anyway, or during the course of the day. So it really wasn’t that deep for me. It was a frequent favour people asked on the college-wide Facebook group though: Does anyone have a spare pink carnation? I have an exam in an hour and mine has died! #Oxfordproblems.

Graduation

                The most ridiculous ceremony I have ever been part of. It was streamed online so some of my friends got to watch, and they were completely confounded.

                The introduction was in English. It was the only part spoken in a language I understood. The rest was in Latin.

                The proctor defended this for most of his speech, saying that “some people” might find it strange that the ceremony is conducted in Latin, but this is how it was done in the 1000s and so this is how we continue to do it. Alright then mate, if we had that approach to all of life we would still be doing a lot of terrible things because “that was how it was done back in the day”… Oh wait, Oxford already has that approach to everything.

                I have friends that studied Classics (Ancient Latin and Greek) that didn’t even understand all of the ceremony. So what hope did I have?

Luckily, our families in the audience had translations in the programmes they were carrying. We didn’t. So we sat through our own graduation ceremonies barely comprehending a word.

                Though there were some things we understood. When the proctor read out Engineeringaria and Computeria or some such invented word to denote subjects that obviously didn’t exist in the time of the Roman Empire, my friends and I couldn’t help ourselves. We burst out laughing. The absurdity was just hilarious.

                At several points in the ceremony, two proctors walked the length of the hall, to the door and back, holding their sceptres. Just because. Apparently it represents soliciting the votes of the Deans, allowing students to be admitted to their degrees. If you’ve ever seen two grown adults walking back and forth silently up and down a hall you’ll know it’s pretty hilarious. You could see a mix of embarrassment and amusement on their own faces.

                There was also a frightening recurrence of people taking off their soft caps or mortarboards (only certain people are even allowed to wear their mortarboards inside – not the common graduates of course!) before anything could happen. The three Proctors, sitting on their thrones like royalty, would do this about three times. It was ridiculous.

                You know how at a normal university, your name is called out and you go up and get your certificate from someone and shake their hand? We don’t do that. We actually get our certificates sent to us in the post a month later, and instead of going up separately, we go up in a massive group. One of the people in this group has to hold hands with the Dean. (Yes, really. Thank God it wasn’t me.) And then comes the bowing.

The bowing. I’ve watched the video my Uncle made of me walking up and it turns out we bowed EIGHT TIMES. The Proctors watch you all bow to them, three consecutively, and then stand, and bow again, and again, and again… I felt like I was part of a pantomime. I was on the front row and I really couldn’t stop myself from smirking.

And of course after you hear a long paragraph of Latin you don’t understand, you have to respond with ‘Do fidem’ (apparently it means I swear) – yet you don’t even understand what you’re swearing to.

                After that you leave as everyone claps for you, and you come back with your fur hood attached to your graduation gown. This means you have officially been conferred with your degree from the university.

                Once the ceremony’s over, you stand outside and have to keep donning your mortarboard to all the university officials as they leave the premises.

                The whole thing was just a complete joke. But the graduation gown did look nice.

With the living legend that is my mum.

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Part 6: The Work.