In 1994, I started university

In 1994, I started university.

I was seventeen, and at the beginning of O week I moved into my first student flat, at 11 Craigleith Street in North East Valley. We drove to Dunedin in a station wagon with trailer attached, a two-and-a-half hour trip with Jesus Christ Superstar in the tape deck. I sang along most of the way. I had a single bed, a chest of drawers, and a bursary consisting of an A, three Cs and an E. Back then, that was all you needed.

I didn't know heaps of people who had done a degree, or who had white collar jobs. I didn't know what to expect from Otago University, except that it would be lofty. I believed, genuinely, that things would be covered in ivy – that merely going to university would reveal a smart person inside of me, who had up to that point been well concealed.

I came to university with a cohort of other kids from my Invercargill school, although I don't know if the others had romantic dreams. The economy was changing, and without a degree, it was getting hard for a school leaver to find a job. Working class kids, the first generation in our families, were enrolling en masse, as our dads got laid off, and our mums took up whatever part-time work they could, to hold it together.

As we did, people were hotly debating the changing model of tertiary education in Aotearoa, everywhere from Parliament to protests on George Street. Some argued this influx of students like me, paying newly-introduced fees, was the answer to university elitism. Others called it a neoliberal sausage machine. I was torn. I opposed elitism, but I really liked sausages.

In my flat were me, two school friends, and another local girl who also had little self-confidence. It didn’t really occur to me to try, academically, because it had never done me much good before. I aimed to pass and watched Sally Jessy Raphael at lunchtime, adjusting the rabbit ears on the clapped out TV. I had anxiety and depression, and I believed it was the latter that was crippling me, but it was really the former. People knew about depression then – it was a thing that got you carted away to a ward if you admitted to it – but they didn’t know about anxiety yet.

My flatmates were a delight, and still are: they made me laugh, despite myself, all the time. We talked shit and cooked badly and angsted about keeping the power bill down. My diet involved large quantities of liquorice allsorts bought from the Jumbo Dairy, Holiday 20 cigarettes, and the cheapest beer that the guy at the local off license was willing to sell to underages. VB, mostly.

I got sick often enough that I ceased to pay much attention to it, my nose running like a busted mains. During one bout, I had a test for glandular fever, and learned with surprise I’d already had it. I was so accustomed to feeling kind of grotty that I hadn’t noticed.

I didn't know how to be.

I was meant to be the special one, the first in my family to enrol. I had dreamed of making it to university, my heart almost broken the year before when one of my three bursary Cs had threated to be a D, which would have cost me university entrance.

And when I made it, I knew this was the opportunity that would create me, the time of my life. Better looking people in better looking clothes smiled at me from the pages of the university prospectus. I would reinvent myself, be limitless. I wanted to be urbane and sharp witted and make insightful observations about postmodernism. But I had a thick Southland accent, was uncertain about everything, and my hands shook when I spoke. Mostly, I didn’t speak. Even so, I listened, and the ideas that I learned – mumbled under dimmed lecture theatre lights by old men with overhead projectors – were beautiful to me, even though my mind turned them over inexpertly, got me Cs.

By and large, things weren’t covered with ivy. The bedroom of my flat, however, was covered with mould. In later years, 11 Craigleith Street, where I spent the first two and maybe hardest years of my university life, became – maybe a little unfairly – a kind of symbol in my mind for all the things I felt about that time.

That flat was awful, as student flats mostly were. Moisture ran down the window interiors; I found my breath condensed damply on my duvet in the mornings. They say variety is the spice of life: I found both black and green mould varieties on the surfaces of my chest of drawers and single bed. I paid $50 a week for my room: any more would have been bourgeois, and probably have drawn the condemnation of the campus socialist league I’d nervously joined.

I may have felt I didn’t fit the mould, but the goddam mould still made itself at home.

I lived in Dunedin for a few years. Things got better, although I never became very urbane. There were other flats, and though they never rivalled 11 Craigleith Street for respiratory illness, nor did they quite reach its strange nostalgia. I lingered at university longer than I should have, not quite knowing how to start a life beyond it. Friends who knew what they were doing went on to move cities, make careers. I stayed behind, got pregnant. You don’t really need to know what you’re doing for that.

Life is a journey. Some people move with purpose to destinations they’ve always planned. And some of us sleep in, wake up hungover and miss their bloody Jetstar flight. That’s OK. I was raised practical: I know if you can’t achieve your dreams, you need to adjust your dreams. Eventually I decided, a little belligerently, that if I couldn’t be smart, I’ll at least be thick on my own terms.

With my new baby, I went back to university, started again. My lecturers nurtured me: a tiny seed of confidence was planted. In return, I gave learning my head and my heart, my labour, my wairua. I both listened and spoke. I set a goal: beginning a PhD. This time, I stuck with it, formally starting the day after I had my second baby. My thesis topic was to do with New Zealand social policy changes during the time period I’d grown up and started university. It helped me made sense of my world – over several sometimes excruciating years of study, hunched over journals and books and words that would not flow – and there was a kind of healing in this new journey.

I graduated with my doctorate in 2017. My journey had by now taken a direction I never foresaw: I had a fulltime job and we’d moved first to Naenae then to Upper Hutt. Clearly, I was now the old and bourgeois person of my former socialist mockery: so much so that the night before my capping, when drunk students had a barney outside the window of my George Street motel, I got out of bed and yelled at them to STFU. When I vowed no one would interrupt my dreams again, I meant it very literally.

The next day, when I walked in my gown across the Town Hall stage, was one of the happiest of my life. I was no longer the one to afraid to speak, or to try. My journey, my terms, and I’d reached my destination.

Outside of my graduation, I haven’t been back to Dunedin very often, since moving away thirteen years ago – but I was down this weekend for a wedding. There was so much I didn’t recognise from days gone by: a spruced up campus, boutique stores where cruddy coffee shops use to be.

In search of something, on a whim, my family and I drove out to North East Valley, down Craigleith Street. I looked out the window quietly, memories keeping me company. I think I wanted to show the kids something of my journey, of the life I thought I’d have before I made the one I’ve got.

The attached photo is what I found.

To be honest, the removal of the roof, walls and floor of the flat probably didn’t materially affect the inside temperate of that godforsaken craphole. There were bricks littered everywhere, and a pipe plaintively spouting water out of the ground where the toilet used to be. The dunny itself was sitting at the side of the section, round about where I used to keep my DREAMS.

I got out of the car. I stood on the side of the road, stared, contemplated in silence the meaning of my present, my past.

And then climbed back in the car and exclaimed WTF and laughed while my bored kids played on their phones. Nostalgia is a trap, just like other people’s expectations. Climb free. Have no journey further than the Jumbo Dairy if you like – but if you want a journey, slam the prospectus shut and choose your own. Doesn’t matter whether you’re seventeen or seventy. You don’t owe your self-doubt another minute.

Life is but a discarded toilet in the weak winter sun. I’m sure I remember that from some lecture in a paper I got a C in.