I can’t remember the day I started calling dinner “lunch” and tea “dinner”, but I know that it happened, because that’s what I call them now. That must mean I’m middle-class, where once I was working-class; though, no matter how posh I get, I can’t bring myself to call (what I now call) dinner “supper”. Supper for me means (with apologies to the writer Stuart Maconie) having a Kit-Kat in your dressing gown in front of something racy on Channel 4. Social mobility has its limits: limits which, perhaps, you have to set yourself in order to stay at least halfway related to the person you started out as.

I grew up on a West Midlands council estate as part of an extended family that would once have been described as “respectable working-class”. I went to school in the 80s and early 90s on the same estate, in an educational environment that didn’t expect or prepare young people to stay on beyond 16, and progressed from there to a sixth-form college in a middle-class area full of straight-A students. I went on to the University of London, and from there, eventually, I got to here: lecturing and writing books about the anxiety induced by being socially mobile. The questions for me have always been: how did that happen? Why does it induce such anxiety? Why is it such a big deal to change social class?

The subject of class obsesses me, as it does a lot of people who started life in one class and have ended up in another. Changing class is like emigrating from one side of the world to the other, where you have to rescind your old passport, learn a new language and make gargantuan efforts if you are not to lose touch with the people and habits of your old life, even if they are among the relationships and things dearest to your heart. The effect of this is psychologically disruptive, sometimes extremely so; yet it’s rarely discussed alongside the received wisdom about social mobility, which is that it is unequivocally a Good Thing for individuals and for society as a whole.

Lynsey Hanley( at front behind boy) with family and neighbours at a street party in Chelmsley Wood to celebrate the royal wedding, July 1981.

I felt kinship with Hoggart’s essential loneliness as every exam he passed took him further away

The cultural critic Richard Hoggart, who died in 2014 aged 95, spent his working life insisting on the central importance of social class in British society. Hoggart noted consistently that its ability to shape and distort experience had not diminished in the lifetime of the postwar welfare state, but kept finding new ways to do so as the living standards of the population improved as a whole. Hoggart lived long enough to document apparently huge changes in society, all the while noting that many of those changes were on the surface only. They must have been. The first time I read his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy I felt he could have been writing about my own childhood, which took place 60 years after his. When he writes about the “fine topcoat” of empty salmon and fruit tins on the Hunslet middens [rubbish heaps] at Sunday teatime in the 1930s, I’m instantly transported back to my parents’ kitchen in Birmingham in the late 80s, sticking on Radio 1 to hear the top 40 countdown, getting out the can opener, mashing the salmon with vinegar and plopping Dream Topping on the peaches. I felt kinship with Hoggart’s essential loneliness as every exam he passed took him further away – in travel and in experience – from his working-class neighbourhood and closer to a place that was more comfortable in every way except for the emotions that accompanied him. “Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class,” wrote Hoggart in 1989; yet “each decade the coffin stays empty.”

The desire for self-improvement, in certain circumstances, can turn you into a lunatic. In 1993, when I was 17, I was doing five A-levels and four jobs, scuttling between them by bus on the south-eastern periphery of Birmingham. My main job was working in an east Birmingham branch of Greggs, the baker’s shop; the second was selling Avon cosmetics; the third, a paper round; and the fourth, making cakes and chocolates and selling them door to door. The last one involved buying large amounts of baking ingredients from an Aldi supermarket five miles from the estate where I lived with my parents. I took the bus to Aldi because it was so much cheaper than the Food Giant nearby. I spent about £8 on my ingredients, and expected to make about £60 from the results.

I didn’t need the money in the sense that, without it, I would have gone hungry. My family didn’t need it – not in the way that, a generation or so earlier, they would have needed a 17-year-old’s wages in order to maintain household solvency. What I needed was the feeling that my life was going places, namely, somewhere other than the place in which it was currently stuck. It wasn’t money that was going to get me out of that place, a large estate built to house 60,000 people from inner Birmingham on its farthest outskirts – not money on the scale I was earning, anyway. As much as the five A-levels, it was the desperation.

I have a map in my mind of where I grew up, on this largest of estates. How can that be so, when it feels as though I never knew anyone here, as though I passed through it like a ghost? I must have walked along every walkway at some point without being able to tell you why. There were always errands to run, I guess, and walls to jump. Shortcuts to discover. Trying to find the way out took 18 years, during which I went to playschool, in the square church hall, then primary and secondary schools, in square brown buildings, and caught a million buses through the estate. I wore out my shoes delivering the newspapers and the Avon catalogues, and running up and down the Greggs shop floor between the bread slicer and the trays of doughnuts for sugaring and bagging. Yes, I had quite a life here before I left. I had a childhood here; the lion’s share of my education took place here. I’d always thought my life started only when I left, but perhaps that’s because it’s what I told myself would happen: I’ll get out of here and then I’ll really start living. But isn’t part of living savouring that freshly sugared doughnut? I can taste the jam in it now, and can tell you it tastes just as good in east Birmingham as it would anywhere else. We knew we were living at New Year’s Eve parties, at the social club near my parents’ house, when the floor was packed and, for once, nobody cared about your haircut or what your dancing was like. That one night a year, for several years, came quite close to redeeming all the others. The DJ would build up the set, easing in with hits from the current top 40, merging into lesser-known Motown and northern soul tracks for the connoisseurs before ending with the party full monty: Tainted Love, We Are Family and Oops Upside Your Head. For no reason I can fathom, we “danced” this sitting down in a conga line. It was the one night of the year I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

With a toy piano, 1981.

We ate a lot of mince in Chelmsley Wood. We were shorter and shyer than the teams of schoolkids from the other half of the borough we’d occasionally beat at skittleball. When our primary schoolteachers saved up yoghurt pots to bring in for seed-planting, I remember that the labels were always from Sainsbury’s, not Somerfield or Kwik Save. Because of this their lives seemed redolent of another, impossibly profligate world: you got the impression they didn’t shop at the indoor market. They all had cars because they all lived far from us: another way in which they were different. To be honest, they probably ate mince in the suburbs too, but in exotic dishes such as lasagne.

Let’s imagine a day in Year 9, at the turn of the new decade, in our computer studies class. At 11 in the morning, the teacher would be crying and her tallest pupil would be singing pop songs over the top of her quiet entreaties for him to stop. The girls would be comparing brands of hair mousse, bought from Superdrug on the way home the previous afternoon, and the boys would be going ‘Arr no miss! OH NO! AH, MAN! Arr no miss! Look miss, he’s torn me cowt! Arr God! Me pen’s run ewt! I cor write enythin’ dewn! Ah fookin’ ’ell man!’ About six of us, out of 15, would be sitting in our chairs; the rest would be wandering around, picking pens up and dropping them again and feigning horror at their spatial incontinence. ‘Arr miss, that means I can’t do me work now!’ There was this ginger kid who warmed his carton of free milk at dinnertime by nestling it in his crotch. A decent chunk of every day would be like this, and would have been like this since primary school. You would learn to put up with it, like traffic jams. I’d try to get through by breathing slowly. We’ve got English later, I would say to myself, and that should be better.

There is a sense in which you buy, or are sold, a one-way ticket. You can go back, but never again on the same terms

The problem was that the teacher was frightened of us, and this would prevent her from giving any instructions with authority. She may have been scared because she might have heard terrible things about what went on in this school: that the children were animals and you would never get through to them. She may have wanted to better understand, even befriend, these deprived children, who could explain to her that such deprivation would inure us to instruction by a figure from outside our limited realm of understanding. We didn’t know how to get her to teach us. All we could do was show her what would happen if she couldn’t control us.

The classrooms were locked on an average day until our form teachers arrived at 8.45 in their cars from the suburbs. Those of us girls who had shown up early would be sitting on the stairs, pretending not to watch the boys playing football in the stairwells, reading Smash Hits or fiddling about with makeup from the precinct. By this time, in Year 9, we would have had months’ worth of schooling wasted due to a basic incompatibility between teachers and pupils, the classroom and the lives lived outside it. We would have been told more than once that we were insolent and moronic and destined for the dole queue: except for me, who would be told, in front of all the others, that I was different and ought to be regarded as a role model for wanting to learn.

My chief memory of secondary school is this pervasive sense we all shared of having been condemned to a dump, yet assuming that there was no alternative but to put up with it. And yet that doesn’t do justice to my experience in the whole. There was the fun we had raising money for charity, getting fired up by art and history projects, and a bizarre week at the end of one financial year when the school had to use up some unspent funds and we went on a coach trip every day of the final week of term. Sometimes, when plays were put on and Christmas concerts brought everyone together, our experiences of school couldn’t have been bettered anywhere. But looking back, I’m struck by how atomised we were as pupils; how the prospect of forming caring friendships seemed laughable. We’d taken right inside ourselves a dog-eat-dog, siege-like survivalist mentality: not all of us, I must emphasise, but enough of us to determine the overall character of the school environment. We exploited one another – for money and grades, for lunchbox contents and goodwill – and fell out with one another, not just for a few days, but for years, over perceived slights. This exploitation was based on the simple fact that we hadn’t been taught, or we had refused to learn, that it is all right for people to be different.

‘The swot’s option’: Smash Hits, March 1986 with the Pet Shop Boys on the cover. Photograph: Smash Hits

The other thing I remember most strongly about secondary school is a feeling of isolation. I lacked loyalty to the group because I felt they were completely wasting their time doing what they did, and I “didn’t mek it easy for meself” by trying to fit in. Although they would complain every day about how boring it was, doing what they did, they’d go and do the same thing again the next night and the next. It was just what you did. I didn’t want to sit on the fence with the girls watching the boys do things; I wanted to do things myself.

Doing things on my own most often meant doing something involving words. The many hours I would have spent each night out- of-doors, hanging about on the youth club walls, listening to music – with other kids, not alone – or watching the boys play football, were instead absorbed by sitting downstairs with my parents, one eye on the telly, the other on my homework, or writing upstairs in my bedroom. There, alone, warm, I’d try to understand the racket that was being made on the John Peel show, or creak out essays, treatises and letters one thesaurus-researched word at a time. No siblings to barge in, no voices to intrude beyond those I selected. What social life I had was conducted entirely through pen and paper. At school I couldn’t think of anything to say, whereas in this parallel universe I couldn’t stop talking.

From the late 80s onwards I’d been an obsessive fan of the Pet Shop Boys, who managed the feat of being regular Smash Hits cover stars (possibly aided by the fact that their singer, Neil Tennant, had once been its assistant editor) and a significant chart act without disguising the fact that they were middle-class men in their 30s who liked reading. Because of their popular appeal – they had three No 1 singles between the summer of 1987 and spring 1988, which Tennant describes inimitably as their ‘imperial phase – their biggest fans were teenage girls. What united fans of the Pet Shop Boys was a sort of bookishness married to a sort of classlessness: we weren’t of the right milieu to have followed Morrissey, for instance, whose absence from Radio 1’s daytime programming was almost total. The Pet Shop Boys were, at least for a time, truly popular rather than being a cult act that had hits. And yet. There was a class dimension to being a Pet Shop Boys fan, made more obvious in a way by the even greater popularity of Erasure, another not-conventionally-attractive keyboard duo. Erasure were, to put it coarsely, the working-class version of the Pet Shop Boys: they were brasher, more direct. Erasure were massive at school, whereas no one except me liked the Pet Shop Boys. (Perhaps you can see a pattern emerging here.) They encouraged singalongs at their gigs, while the Pet Shop Boys had the same set designers as the English National Opera. Erasure were popular with middle-aged working-class women; by comparison, preferring the Pet Shop Boys was something of the swot’s option.

Lynsey Hanley (second from left, front row) and classmates collect their GCSE certificates, October 1992.

One day in 1989, a girl at school found my notebook sticking out of my bag, covered in quotes from a Pet Shop Boys annual I’d been given for Christmas. At my school, annuals usually had posters of Bros in them and word-searches made up of top 40 song titles. Obviously, being a Pet Shop Boys annual, this one was different, containing, off the top of my head, a guide to Neil Tennant’s collection of designer suits and a survey of Chris Lowe’s contribution to the field of architecture (the keyboardist/trombonist qualified as an architect at Liverpool University shortly before becoming a pop star), which comprised part of a staircase in a Milton Keynes office block. A biggish crowd gathered, as if a scrap was about to kick off. I mean, if you find a diary, it’s obviously going to have perving in it, which is worth ten minutes of anyone’s dinner break. The girl started reading out bits of it, haltingly, as if from a poorly translated instruction manual. Oh, Seekers of the Truth! So you’re all hip to British Marvel now... [This suit’s by] Comme des Garçons... Who gives a tinker’s cuss for their reputation, I’m giving this one pop single of the week... “Tinker’s cuss”. “Seekers of the truth”. “Comme des Garçons”. Whatever these phrases represented, the gathered crowd didn’t find what they expected in them. There weren’t any rude words (this is when I was still refusing to swear, on the grounds of refusing to do what everyone else did), so that was dull. They drifted away, probably bored to tears. There was nothing in there that could induce embarrassment, not on my part, anyway. I was proud that they didn’t get it: “it”, presumably, being a secret language of taste and class that even I had only half a clue about. Writing random quotes on the sleeve of my notebook was a cack-handed declaration of where I had wanted to be, to get to.

The NME was one of the best cultural investments I could have made, another of those threads I grabbed unwittingly

I picked up my first copy of the NME at Chelmsley Wood library in January 1989, not long before I turned 13. At the time the magazine was emerging from a period during which it believed itself to be a sort of music-themed version of the New Left Review, its writers finding any excuse to shoehorn a bit of continental theory into the weekly singles review. Luckily for me, the NME had started to accept that music which actually got in the charts had something going for it.Anyway, on the cover, that week in 1989, were New Order, a band I’d only heard of because of the mutual appreciation society they’d formed with the Pet Shop Boys. It was because of the Pet Shop Boys connection that they had the odd mention in Smash Hits, which made them seem, I don’t know, plausible for someone like me to listen to. Getting hold of the NME for the first time, even though it would be a long time before I actually understood its contents, meant more than just having something new to read. It was one of the best investments in my future cultural capital I could have made: another of those threads I’d grabbed unwittingly, making a connection between the world I lived in and another world of which I was barely aware: the thinnest thread linking the two for now, which needed reinforcing.

Everything changed when I left school for sixth form college in 1992. One minute I was struggling for air, the next I felt as though I’d entered a large bubble of pure oxygen. In my final month at school and in the absence of advice I decided to study A-levels in English language, art and social biology, which was the closest to sociology the sixth-form college offered. In hindsight, those choices would have got me somewhere, just not where I wanted to go. On my first day at college, I switched to English, politics and history. This gave me an elite-style liberal arts education by accident, the value of which, it turned out, was hard to put a price on.

I appeared to take to sixth-form college and its deceptively welcoming milieu like a duck to water. That’s the exact simile I used to one of my old schoolteachers when I went back to see them a few months later, the triumphant sixth-former in my new indie clothes. Did this mean I was now middle-class? Did it mean I’d been middle-class all along, and that had been the real reason I’d always felt like such a misfit? Christ alone knew. I couldn’t get my head around it, even though at the same time I felt more comfortable in that environment than I’d ever done elsewhere. I’d only ever been able to be myself at home; now I could be myself anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. I still wasn’t sure how wearing Doc Martens in Chelmsley Wood precinct was going to go. Not that I went there as much as I used to: mysteriously, the things I now wanted to buy – clumpy boots, broadsheet newspapers, Suede records – could be bought only in Solihull or in Birmingham, the great metropolis. Another great point of confusion was realising that the middle-class way of being was itself as homogenising as anything I’d known previously. It’s obvious that each class has its tropes and its boundaries, its insiders and outcasts. There was a degree of interchangeability: shellsuits from the indoor market became army surplus shirts from the flea market; trainers became Docs; the pop charts became the indie charts. With 20-odd years’ hindsight, it makes sense, of course, that a class positioned between two other classes might be the greater home for conformity after all.

Lynsey Hanley in her first term at university, London, 1994.

So the questions returned. Is this it? Do you have to pick a side and stick to it, even when there are bits of both that don’t feel right to you? When something as total as your whole domestic and local environment has been shaped in one way, to encounter a world in which that environment would have been shaped another way is wholly disorienting. That is when, and how, the breakdown came. By the spring of 1993, after holding these two parts of myself together for the first two terms, I found I couldn’t do it any more. In the first few months I’d been too caught up in novelty and light-headedness to notice any disquiet; after Christmas, when it became clear that I was struggling with the A-levels themselves, never mind the place where I was studying them, things got trickier. Travelling to college in the dark, I listened to my Walkman on the bus louder every day as if trying to glean the secrets of the universe, while reading the NME as if it were the horoscope. One lunchtime, after a short college day, I went into Birmingham to borrow records from the library. What I remember is ordering soup in a cafe with my mum, having been at sixth form that morning, and the next thing, curling into a ball, crying. Later, being helped on to the bus back to Chelmsley Wood, and all the old ladies tutting, “Ah, shame”.

I fell apart inside, quite comprehensively, and expressed it through withering away, refusing to eat

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been: I didn’t drop out or fail any exams, even though, ever the dictionary swallower, I’d told my history teacher that I’d found the course “rather impenetrable”. But I did fall apart inside, quite comprehensively, and expressed it through withering away, refusing to eat; bearing, in Hilary Mantel’s words, “smiling, skeletal witness” to the gap that had appeared between the old life and the new one. Throughout this I tried doggedly to penetrate the impenetrable: to do something effectively impossible, which was to show myself and the world that if you took enough exams, and passed them, you could glide seamlessly onwards and upwards. I kept going in, day after day, even when feeling faint with derangement, in all probability because I couldn’t countenance the thought of it not working out. Over a period of about six months I somehow emerged out of the tunnel, I think simply by realising that telling people what was happening was preferable to not telling them and having to drop out as a result. I realised that to make friends properly you have to tell them significant things about yourself, something I feel grateful to have realised at 17 and no later.

Eventually I learned that most people do have to pick a side, even if they do it unconsciously. I didn’t decide pragmatically to become middle-class in order to access social esteem and higher wages. It happened that way because I happened to stay on at school. There is a sense in which you buy, or are sold, a one-way ticket. You can go back, but never again on the same terms.

Lynsey Hanley at home in Liverpool, 2016. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

In 2015 a visit to Aldi is not, for me at least, the same experience as it was in 1993. I no longer struggle back on the bus with tins of peaches in a cardboard box. Now I fill with my jute bag with bottles of cold-pressed rapeseed oil and pinot noir. Aldi operates a two-tier system, reflecting the disparate degrees of economic and cultural capital of its customers. You can still get your staples cheaper than anywhere else, with an added layer of quotidian luxuries on sale for members of the urban middle class who love a bargain but wouldn’t starve if they couldn’t go there. Because my class struggle is over, I can go to Aldi for fun, for additional delight in a life already full of it.

I am close to 40 now and it’s only in the very recent past that I’ve been able to visit the place I came from, the place that was once my home, without believing it to be some sort of vortex that had to be outrun, outwitted. In this, I’m a bit behind Richard Hoggart: he put the age at which the socially uprooted person might once again be able to “smile at his father with his whole face” at around 25. Over the years I’ve accrued advantages like loyalty points, the bonuses getting bigger every time I’ve moved a notch up the social ladder. Filling in the “Great British Class survey” on the BBC’s website in 2011, I was entirely unsurprised to discover that I was now part of the “established middle class”: gregarious, keen on the arts, immersed in culture at all levels yet part of an emerging cultural elite that is somehow able to make social and economic gains from knowing the “right” kinds of people and things. You need to know the names of theatre directors as well as football managers, just as you need to learn that Farrow & Ball aren’t a comedy double-act.

I’ve spent my working life looking at the ways people are kept apart, and keep themselves apart, by the methods we use to sustain class in society. I have tried to show the impact of class segregation, through housing and schooling, on minds and relationships that are being formed. I want to illustrate the shortcomings of a political narrative that places the onus for social mobility – for “getting out” of the working class and into the middle class – on individuals, rather than making it possible for everyone, regardless of occupation, to live comfortably. Governments of every stripe encourage individuals to move upwards, to change their class, to trade up, while never acknowledging the emotional costs of doing so. I can only speak in this way because I have been through this process myself. I have undertaken that risky, lonely journey from one class to another, and every day I feel a mixture of gratitude and elation to have had the chance to do so, because it has given me the life I have now.I am grateful to my parents for giving me a level of confidence in myself and my abilities that they didn’t always have in themselves. I feel elated because I somehow got to the other side, to the place where life is easier, in one piece. But what about those who try, and don’t?

Or those who, rightly, don’t see why they have to choose sides in the first place? Until we recognise the psychological impact of class, social mobility will always be double-edged. Learning, art and culture can be catalysts for forging connections between the classes. They can be used to unite as well as to divide, to liberate as well as to limit, but only if we are included, and have the confidence to include ourselves, in their creation.

Extracted from Respectable: The Experience of Class published by Allen Lane on 28 April (£16.99). To preorder a copy for £12.99 click here.

Lynsey Hanley will be taking part in Class Wars with Owen Jones, Rachel Johnson and guests, a Guardian membership event, at Cecil Sharp House in London on Tuesday 26 April.