I just got out of the shower, and whilst there I was thinking about the element of chance and how it plays a role in people's life generally. I have my own story of interlocking chance and how it brought me from school in 1992 to where I am now. I thought I'd write it down finally after having thought about it for several years.
1992 was my final year of school, Year 12 as we call it and the Higher School Certificate (HSC) was in full swing. This is the final series of exams which determine which University course you can apply for. Things were not going well, after several years of academic excellence, my grades were plummeting. Problems with my body image and growing gender dysphoria plus increasing dissatisfaction with being trapped in a Catholic boarding school were taking their toll. My eccentricities increased, my label as "weird" became ever more apt as I fell through each exam with my stress levels growing towards unmanageable proportions. Finally I couldn't take it any more and I snapped. I snapped in a fairly mild way, one night a few days before the final exam (3 Unit Agriculture) I left the boarding house quietly in the middle of the night with all my school notes and a bottle of methyalted spirits I had "liberated" from the school laboratories. I knew what I was doing, but in a vague dream-like way.
I sat on the shore of the River amongst the cold rocks and consigned years of notes to a small yet deeply symbolic bonfire. This could not go unnoticed and in a little while some of the boarding masters came down to investigate. By then I was feeding the last of the painstakingly hand-written course notes into the dying embers. They sent me back to the boarding house which I went to with a minimum of fuss. One of the other boarding house "minders" who I actually liked came down to talk with me, but I was not overly communicative. I never really thought about it, but I guess all the teachers, my parents and all the other students must have known within the next few days. Later I remember the Headmaster talking to me in passing, but I said I was Ok now and he didn't push the subject to much.
I sat the 3 Unit Agriculture exam, but the teacher (who happened to be the "minder" who came to talk to me) gave me a "special circumstances" exemption. Without this I surely would have failed the exam. Many months later when our results came out I received a disappointing TER of 60.63 (where 100 is the best in the state). The exemption on the final exam had bumped my mark up by a few points. Given that this was the worst result of the three children in my family I was discouraged. The low TER eliminated me from most of the good Universities as the TER requirements were the highest they had been for several years. I managed to squeak into an Applied Science course at the newly formed UWS-Hawkesbury by less than a few tenths of a mark, courtesy of the special exemption.
Despite the political rhetoric, the UWS system was at best a second-rate University system, a cobbled together arrangement of ex-Community Colleges which had been given money to upgrade and take the load off the more esteemed inner-city "sandstone" Universities (so named because their old architecture was mostly constructed out of local sandstone).
In retrospect, this was all a blessing. I knew I was intelligent, but the atmosphere of boarding school was crushing my ability to think and grow. If I had been able to go to a first-rate University, I believe the stress and anonymity amongst so many others would have only made things worst. At Hawkesbury, my mind could be liberated and I went up to a distinction average at the top of my class. By being at the top of my class with good results I became eligible to undertake honours, something which would have been denied me if I had been in the middle of a very bright, first-rate University course. From honours I was able to undertake a Ph.D. here at a first-rate University, the Australian National University. Because of moving away from the old networks of friends with their expectations and having spare time to question my life and where it was going and because of access to the internet, finally I truly blossomed into the girl I had been all along.
In a way, the person I am, and the qualifications I soon hope to obtain can all be traced back to an unfortunate series of incidents which at the time seemed like the end of the world. I can't say who or what I may have been otherwise, sometimes the person struggling inside is too powerful not to be let out, but in my own way it makes me realize that a setback is not necessarily a defeat, a battle does not win a war and in deepest misery lies the chance of glorious redemption.