Depression is hardly ever logical. I can’t count the number of times things have been going spectacularly well and I’ve managed to still be deeply unhappy, or ungrateful, or scared, or suddenly felt the urge to run away. If your brain is a little bit west of totally healthy, there’ll still be a little voice whispering: ‘you don’t deserve this’, ‘this is going to go wrong eventually’, no matter how many people laugh at your jokes or love your theory of evolution or your foreign policy.

Logically, this term hasn’t gone perfectly for me. If my depression was still as bad as it had been, say, a year ago, my head probably would have told me to give up around Week 3. Actual bad things have happened, as opposed to imagined bad things. I’ve applied for countless things and been rejected from nearly all of them. I’ve been quite ill. I’ve had a lot of work. Some people have thought I’m not very funny/great/wonderful and that’s been a bit shit. But, despite all the annoyances and upsets and disappointments that I’ve fit into this term, I’ve actually been pretty okay.

I’ve noticed at Cambridge – now, this may be a wild assumption, but let me finish – that none of us are really used to failing. A prominent cause of depression, or at least according to one of my counsellors, is arriving here and discovering that your perception of yourself (as someone who never royally fucks up or ever makes a tiny mistake, for example) is wrong. My first few weeks were a particularly disheartening game of talent-whack-a-mole. ‘I used to play the violin.’ ‘Oh, me too, I have my Diploma!’ SMACK! ‘I like skiing.’ ‘I ski for Great Britain!’ SQUASH! ‘I can eat a burrito without the filling coming out’ ‘I won the eating-a-burrito-without-the-filling-coming-out world championships.’ KABLAMMO! (I’ve been listening to Alan Partridge’s audiobook and shouted sound effects have become my go-to.)

So feeling like you’ve failed can lead to depression, but once its set in, I’m not completely sure that you can ‘feel’ failure. Everything feels equally flat and grey. At my worst, I had more or less the same reaction to failure and success. I didn’t get onto a course I wanted to do so I assumed that I was useless and no-one liked me. I did get onto the course I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to leave my room, or talk to people, or try, and why did I even apply in the first place, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I said a couple of weeks ago that it was good to be able to feel sad again. It’s also been good to get my sense of perspective back. Pre-anti-depressants, losing a pair of headphones would be devastating, while losing touch with a good friend would leave me pretty numb. Nothing made sense. It wasn’t so much that things would pile on top of me, but that I had no idea how to digest the emotional information I was receiving, which meant I didn’t want to take responsibility for my fuck-ups. I didn’t really understand that it was me who was failing or succeeding. I think when you start to feel connected to the world again you perhaps realise too late that the mistakes you made were yours and you have to live with them.

On a cheerier note, I’m better now, and being better means stuff makes more sense. I’ve never ‘failed’ so much in my life, but being able to really connect with something I did, something really concrete, is cool – and ‘failing’ (whatever your perception of that might be) is actually not as bad as you think. The more I do it, the less it hurts. I’m becoming more accustomed to jumping up, dusting myself off and trying again. That last essay was a pile of shit? Okay, fine, I’ll write a better one next week as opposed to bewailing my uselessness and crawling into bed to watch another series of Pretty Little Liars. It’s my fuck-up – they can’t take that away from me.

I don’t know if I can really sit here and tell you, however your Easter term is looking, that ‘everything is going to be fine.’ It probably will be, because, from what I’ve heard, you’re all a clever bunch. I’m not just talking about exams, but everything that you run, jump, act, paint, debate, write or limbo dance in. Fucking up is good. Fucking up will set you free.