This week was A Level results week in England. Having worked in education for many years, it’s been an annual occurrence that has brushed against the edges of my professional life. But this year it put a hand on my shoulder and swivelled me round so I could examine it like Dr House approaching a patient with an unexplained illness. At first, I couldn’t understand why it looked different to me. I thought about my son, who is halfway through A Levels. I can see how much effort he’s putting into securing a place at his chosen university, and I’m wondering how he will fare next year. Also, many of my student cohort are studying Level 3 qualifications, so it made me consider the journeys they’ve each been on over the last year as they swing the doors open into exam season and make awkward eye contact with the mocks at the bar. But why was I stuck reading the posts about grades not measuring a person’s worth, and the encouraging messages from higher education providers softly corralling students through the clearing process? I think it’s because I found out this year that I have ADHD and Auditory Processing Disorder, and that’s been huge and strange and disorienting and painful in a way I wasn’t prepared for so, now and then, I’ve been holding my diagnoses like an overhead transparency on the projector of my memories to see what appears.

I remember the day I got my A Level results, which is mostly because it’s been a chasm of shame in my life for the last 26 years. I didn’t do well. I have 5 A Levels and I didn’t fail any of them, but I also didn’t get the grades I was capable of; in the words of my French teacher, I got the grades I deserved. Actually, she made a point of coming to tell me that I didn’t deserve the D I had been awarded, but you get the gist. It was a moment that crushed me for years afterwards, a vicious earworm nibbling at my brain.

To explain it very briefly, I moved to England when I was 15. It was the fifth country I’d lived in, and I’d been to 6 schools across 3 countries in 10 years. By the time I sat my A Levels, I had lived here less than 4 years and had attended a secondary school for 2 years, where I’d had to repeat a year to finish my GCSEs as the curriculum didn’t match up, and a sixth form college, where I was being pushed to choose my ‘next steps’ by this Russel Group feeder behemoth who was growing more and more despondent about my lack of ‘focus’. I struggled to attend, I struggled to become English, and I struggled with feeling the shame and grief at not being who everyone wanted me to be. Of course, I was struggling because of my undiagnosed ADHD and APD, compounded by moving country yet again and having to learn how to belong in a place that should have been ‘home’ but was starkly foreign.

I didn’t want any next steps; I wanted to stay still.

Someone could have noticed that I needed help, but they never did. I stitched the shame into my mask, flipped it over, took a gap year and signed up for a degree, as that’s what everyone expected me to do.

In my current work life, I have the privilege of spending one-on-one time with young people at the start of their careers. In every conversation, we discuss the support they might need, how they’re feeling about their revision, exams, workload, and life in general. If it’s not going to plan, we change the plan, add supports, spend more time, and focus on what’s important or needed at that stage in their journey to make sure they’re successful and happy. I do everything I possibly can to make sure they don’t feel like I did.

I’m not saying I’d have achieved A*s all round in my exams if I’d have had support or if someone had stopped to examine what was really going on with my learning, but I might not have felt such shame at failing expectations. I might have had more time, more understanding, and been gentler on myself.