Last year, I was having coffee with a curator, a person from whom I hoped to extract paid work at some point. It was one of those inconvenient midweek interludes most people who work in the arts must endure, a vague invitation extended by someone with money and opportunities. There is rarely a particular reason specified for meetings of this kind, no promise of material reward, yet you nevertheless trek into central London, spend three hours and £7 you can’t afford, and try to be your best, most charming self. You work a career-highlights reel into supposedly casual conversation, aiming to appear thrilling, and charismatic, and sexy enough that the curator, or commissioner, or editor might wish to purchase some of your cultural capital.

This particular meeting was not going well. The curator looked at her phone more than she looked at me, making me increasingly anxious about my lack of engaging wit, so that eventually I was mugging and pantomiming like a tragic clown to an unresponsive audience. Then, while she was re-checking her email, she muttered something about having to attend her reunion at Cambridge.

“Ask me, ask me, ask me,” I begged her inside my head, and then she did.

“Where did you go to uni?” she asked.

“Oh, I didn’t,” I replied breezily, “I dropped out.”

Finally, I had caught her interest. “Now that – that – is interesting,” she said, jabbing her finger across the table.

It’s 10 years since I dropped out of university. In that decade, I’ve felt vicious hatred toward academia and pre-emptive disdain for all the snobs I imagine to be hiding inside it. I’ve felt, too, a terrible and consuming grief for what might have been, had I not been too stupid. And I’ve gladly indulged the idiot savant fantasies of over-educated, upper-class arts professionals who find my educational vacuum (relatively unusual for an arts writer) to be refreshing and winningly salt-of-the-earth.

When I was a little girl in Waterford, I was clever. I wasn’t a swot exactly, but I loved to learn and was never without a book. I remember finishing novels while still sitting in the bookshop, as my father nattered to some friend he had bumped into, speeding to the end so he could buy me a different one to take home. There is a cutesy bit of family lore which says that when I was four, my grandmother had me on her lap and asked what I wanted Santa to bring me for Christmas, and I replied, pious as anything, “Two little books.”

Adults praised me for this behaviour, so I learned quickly that I was clever, and that being clever was a thing that made other people admire me. I wasn’t a particularly attractive child – stubbornly unathletic, doughy, legendarily the only child in a summer camp gymnastics class who failed to execute a tumble – but I didn’t mind that, not yet. I was clever, instead. On a trip to the Irish capital with my father, when I was still quite small, we walked through the campus of Trinity College Dublin and I was mesmerised by its orderliness, buildings that looked like illustrations, the laughing young adults running about in strange, antiquated garb. “I’m going to go here,” I said to my dad, which became true. “And I’m going to sit under that tree doing my homework,” which did not.

The shame of my failure, which I can still feel plaguing my stomach to this day, was much more acute back then

There are many reasons I dropped out of university, which I did, in fact, not once but twice. The first time was a few months into Film Studies and French at Trinity, subjects chosen because I didn’t have the marks to study English, as I had wanted to, but couldn’t abandon my childhood fantasies of those grand courtyards and exotically Protestant spires. The second was from an English and Cultural Studies course at a smaller college – perhaps things would have been different if I had gone there first time round, but by the time I did arrive I was already too far gone to function.

That I did so twice is a detail I smooth over in glib retellings of my past – complicating, as it does, the impression I want to give of a worldly young intellectual who glanced at the bourgeois trappings of academia and quickly rejected them. The reasons are compelling enough: there was mental illness, there was drinking and there was pregnancy, in a time before abortion was legal in Ireland. I’m convinced that having to be pregnant when you don’t want to be, can’t physically bear to be, is enough to drive a person mad.

It could be as easy as that: I could say, truthfully, I had a run of bad luck. I suspect, though, that I would have dropped out anyway, even without the legitimate traumas I can wheel out to explain myself to others. When I arrived at Trinity, for all my problems, I still believed myself to be essentially clever and interesting, and within four weeks, that idea of myself, which had kept me safe, had been shattered. It wasn’t as though I had always achieved the best grades, but I had prided myself on an insightful approach to things, an original way of thinking – a delusion which was quickly cleared up for me by my film studies tutor. In one of the first, and only, essays I would ever submit to her, she wrote that my analysis of a marriage in an Israeli film about forbidden love “sounds like it comes from a women’s magazine”, a blow so cutting I can still see it flashing before my eyes in her monstrous green ink.

Almost as soon as I began, I was lost. The idea of getting up each day and going to class, of learning over and over again that I was stupid, and crass, and incompetent, did not seem doable. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was there to learn, to become less stupid. I felt I had failed already, fumbled the opening pass. I had arrived to university quite mad already and quickly became exuberantly so, drinking litres of gin by night and lying in bed, shaking with fear, all day long.

It wasn’t laziness, exactly, that stopped me trying to work, but that fear. It lay immobile on my chest. All of Dublin, but especially Trinity, felt corrupted by some malign force that I couldn’t break through. Each morning I would wake up in tears and bargain with myself: I could stay in bed and hide again today, as long as I absolutely did something about it tomorrow. I could see a counsellor, call my tutor, get the train home and tell my dad everything. I would do something that would compel movement out of the static in which I was prone. But, as is the way with days, they became weeks, months, and finally years, and the bargain was never squared, so that what I had feared became true and I really did fail.

Though there is more I could say on this – details that would both elicit sympathy and make me look like a spoiled little shit – that was all there really was to it. The slow, boring poison of drink and secret-keeping, spread out into every part of my life, so that nothing was safe or good any more. Until I woke up one day and realised I could not remember the last time I had read a book.

Megan Nolan, age 18, during her first year at Trinity College, Dublin 2009.

When I dropped out of university for good, I tried to forget about it. The shame of my failure, which I can still feel plaguing my stomach to this day, was much more acute back then. It was specifically in relation to the hell I had put my parents through and the vast quantities of their money that had been wasted on me – money neither of them had to spare. My parents hadn’t gone to university, but they had both made decent, happy lives for themselves, until I tore them up and drained their bank accounts to fund my two-year breakdown.

I wanted to forget because I was so ashamed, and it was easy to forget in a way, because making a living of my own was a new and far more immediate problem than the existential ones I was used to. I spent a couple of years working as an assistant stage manager and in restaurants: intense, urgent places where people asked if you had any cocaine rather than where you went to university. For a while, I was busy forgetting and making ends meet. Everyone I knew who was still at college partied as much as I did and seemed barely to attend lectures. Maybe it wasn’t so shocking, so catastrophic, I began to think, that I was a failure at university. Maybe it was all a big scam.

Then my peers began to graduate and their lives began to look different to mine. I was stunned to find that friends my age were earning a salary instead of being paid by the hour. They had decent winter jackets and sipped cocktails with brunch. Some had pedigree toy dogs. They were real people, like the ones I saw in films. I realised that almost nobody I knew did not have a degree, and the few I did were mostly rich kids, encouraged by their parents to follow whatever unprofitable creative dream they had.

My peers began to graduate. Their lives looked different to mine

I began to learn the meaning of intellectual insecurity. One day, near the end of her degree, my friend Fiona had me read an essay she had written about Pet Sematary by Stephen King, which was one of my favourite books. As I did so, it began to sink in that I had sidestepped, not only an experience, the way of living that university entails, but also an entire mode of thinking. I could tell that the essay was very good because it was well written and structured (she got a first, if I recall), but I had no idea what it meant or why someone would write it. It spoke in a language I didn’t know – the one I had been frightened of and alienated by, and so had never tried to learn – and about ideas I did not understand in relation to the novel. What had the phallus to do with Pet Sematary? To me the book was worth something because it made me cry and feel afraid. It dawned on me then that all I knew how to do was feel, not how to think, and maybe now I would never learn. This is what it has come down to again and again: that I am all raw nerves, no finesse. As my old nemesis the film studies tutor said so cruelly, I am women’s magazines, not critical theory.

Time passed and I became a writer. I had always been writing something or other, but at 23 I began to produce essays and stories more seriously. I read them at spoken word events and art galleries and published them in zines, if at all. Sometimes I worked and socialised with artists, who all seemed to have at least two degrees and a PhD in the pipeline. A man I was seeing was one of these artists and seemed embarrassed and depressed by the prosaic desk job I worked in to pay my rent; at the grotty state of my uneducated life. Around him, and people like him, I became especially bratty in my derision of academic buzzwords, rolling my eyes and drawing on my cigarette outside openings, privately burning with the fervent wish that I might wake up fluent in it all one day. At least then I could deride it honestly.

Four years ago, I moved to London and made a proper go of writing, filing opinion pieces and scrappy personal essays at night, in between temping, until eventually I was doing it full time. I now write columns, book criticism and cultural commentary. I’ve never applied for a job as a staff writer, pre-emptively certain my lack of a degree would prevent me getting through the door. Still, people sometimes email me, passing on academic work they have written in which they reference essays or stories of mine. It’s a mind-bending sensation; feeling too stupid to understand what someone else is saying about me.

Several times I have gone to universities to give guest lectures and have cried tears of pathetic gratitude on the train home – that they would let me do such a thing, get up in front of all those people doing something I couldn’t. It’s shameful, I know, to feel so grovelling toward these institutions. I listen when people tell me what is wrong with these places, the cuts and the corporatisation, that I really didn’t miss out on much, but I always think – well, at least you know.

Of course I could know. I could go back and do it all from the beginning, now, as an adult. People do such things all the time. What I find saddest of all about me and academia – this thing I have spat at and mocked, and cried over, and grieved – is that I know I never will. The sense that I was essentially clever and able to do whatever I put my mind to was knocked out of me. I used to believe there was nothing I couldn’t do, but, as it turned out, I couldn’t do the very first thing I tried; a fact so shocking I don’t think I’ll ever risk trying to disprove it.

I’m happy, mostly, to be a feeling rather than thinking creature, to be ignorant of where things sit in what canon. My internal library has no logistical rhythm. It was curated according to which books made me feel things the most, and at which points in my life. It’s a nice sort of cataloguing, even if useful only to me. There are worse fates in life than to make things you aren’t smart enough to fully understand yourself.

But, still, the university has taken up residence in a regretful part of me. I think of that younger self who didn’t doubt she would end up reading beneath that particular tree, and I want to say sorry. I want to say: I wish that day spent hiding hadn’t turned into a week, and on and on. I wish the bargain was struck after all. I wish I could have done it for you.

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