Let me set the scene for you. It’s 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. I’m sitting in a seminar room surrounded by people who were literally in primary school when I got my first job. They’re talking about their weekends, club nights and flat parties and someone’s situationship drama, and I’m nodding along like I understand, clutching my coffee like a life raft, trying to remember what it felt like to not need eight hours of sleep to function. This is my life now. I’m 34. I’m doing a PhD. Nobody asked the assignment deadlines to follow me into my thirties, and yet. Here we all are.
Assignment submissions follow you. Like an unread email, like a subscription you forgot to cancel, they just keep showing up. I genuinely thought I’d left that particular brand of low-grade panic behind somewhere in my late twenties. Turns out no. Turns out there is always a submission portal waiting for you, always a word count you’re 400 words over, always a citation format you’re doing slightly wrong.
But here’s the part I wasn’t expecting. Here’s the bit that actually got me. For a long time, a long, long time, I was struggling. Job rejections, the soul-crushing routine of applying and waiting and hearing nothing, the slow erosion of your confidence until you start wondering if you’re just… broken somehow. It does things to you, that kind of prolonged uncertainty. It quietly dismantles your social life, your self-worth, your sense of what you’re even for. I won’t dress it up. It was rough.
And then somehow, somehow, I ended up here. Back in a university building that smells exactly like every university building ever built, sitting next to someone half my age who’s asking me if I’ve heard of Stranger Things, and I get to say: yes, actually, I’m a person, I watch things. Small victories. But genuinely, something shifted when I started. It’s like someone found the dusty old reset button on me and pressed it. You know that feeling when your laptop’s been overheating and sluggish and then you actually restart it and it just… works again? That. Submit an assignment, get feedback that says your ideas are interesting and your argument is solid, and something in your chest just quietly unknots. Give a presentation, have a classmate come up afterward and say they loved your angle on it, and suddenly you remember, oh right, I am capable of things. I forgot. But I remember now.
I’m also learning to believe in effort again. For a while there, trying hard felt pointless. You’d put everything in and get nothing back and eventually the sensible part of your brain goes: why bother? But there’s something about university, about this slightly absurd, paper-submitting, seminar-attending life, that is quietly restoring my faith in the effort-to-reward ratio. I work, something happens. Wild concept. Deeply underrated.
And the social bit! Okay so I look like a grandma at the campus events, I fully acknowledge this. I am the person asking where the tea is while everyone else is asking where the bar is. But there are, genuinely, people here. Lovely, unexpected, kind people. The university throws these random events, talks, socials, networking things, and I’ve started going to them with the energy of someone who has absolutely nothing to lose, which it turns out is a very freeing place to operate from. I’m relearning how to talk to people. How to laugh at something properly. How to let someone be kind to you without immediately suspecting they want something.
Here’s what I keep noticing: kindness lands differently when you weren’t expecting it. When a classmate ten years younger than you takes your ideas seriously in a group discussion, or a professor writes “this is a genuinely compelling argument” on your work, it hits. Because you weren’t braced for it. And those little moments are doing something. I don’t fully have the language for it yet, but they’re filling something back in.
Also being away from family has somehow made me appreciate them more? From a safe distance, across some very wholesome voice notes, I find myself actually missing them rather than just existing in proximity to them. Who knew. Distance: occasionally useful.
So yes. I am 34 and I am a PhD student and I feel roughly 80% confused at all times and I have an assignment due that I am definitely not thinking about. But I also feel, for the first time in a while, like life handed me a reset button and I pressed it.
And for the first time in a long time, it just feels right. Right now. Atleast right now.
Written from the library, surrounded by people who were born in the 2000s. Thriving, mostly. Send snacks.