I want to be honest about a feeling I had in Michaelmas term of my third year, which in a place like this goes unexpressed because generally we are too damn proud to express it, and too scared of what it might mean. Thankfully, it is a feeling I have very much got over and also have a great deal of compassion for ­– by this stage.

It is a feeling that unfortunately came to me, and, I suspect, comes to many people during their final year. When I returned to Cambridge after a liberating, warm summer I was overcome by a wave of anxiety that stemmed from people asking me the dreaded question: “What are you doing next year?”

It came from everyone. My parents, irritatingly – I mean, could a writer and psychologist be any more spiritually sorted? – were the first to badger me with it. But even people I vaguely knew in Fitz cafe would send me into a whirlwind of panic.

“This world of ‘competencies’ is so overwhelming, and alien, and new, and I’m already behind on my Aeneid essay anyway!”

Not that it was their fault. In hindsight, what was I really afraid of? The truth is, I think I was so shaken by the existential anxiety caused by having the first free year in my life coming closer and closer with no plan whatsoever that the part of my brain responsible for creating ideas became paralysed. This was exacerbated by the impression that everyone else knew they wanted to go into banking, into consultancy, into the arts, into law, and had the requisite experience gained from student politics or student journalism to guarantee that they would get whatever they applied for.

What did I do? What could I say for myself? Okay, I co-captain a football team (the silent awareness that my team had just been relegated two leagues down tugged at me insistently but politely), I co-run a Collage Society, quite enjoy teaching and I’m really into Mindfulness, but that was literally it. My CV felt more like a black hole than a piece of writing with the potential to make some unlucky Graduate Recruitment Officer’s dreams come true. Especially when all the absolutely brilliant people I know who have achieved everything there is to achieve in Cambridge were getting rejected for jobs and internships left, right and centre. My inner monologue at the time went something like this: “Do I have leadership skills? I feel barely qualified to be in charge of myself, let alone other people! Communication skills? Again, what does that even mean? This world of ‘competencies’ is so overwhelming, and alien, and new, and I’m already behind on my Aeneid essay anyway!”

The panic was paralysing. I felt so worried and ashamed of not knowing what I wanted to do with my life when it seemed like everyone else did, so drained by the constant conversation on this subject that my creativity really just shut down. When you’re unhappy, it’s so hard to think about what you want to do with your life because just making it through the day seems like a bit of an ordeal. There’s a Tim Minchin song, ‘Some People Have it Worse Than I’, with the lyrics: “Well I wake up in the morning at 11:57 and I can’t believe I have to face the horror of another fucking day/ And the magnificent magnitude of my morning erection/ Merely mocks me like the sun in its optimistic greeting of the day.”

This is a (hilarious) representation of the most extreme version of what I was feeling. I don’t want to whine too much: there was still a lot of joy in that term (mostly found in the company of my friends at the pub), but I did feel quite low at times and it did turn into a cycle: anxiety shut down my creativity which in turn made me worried that I was the only person without enough passion to push me in a certain direction. In short, if you’ll excuse the self-indulgence of my prose for a teeny tad longer, that I didn’t have any or enough soul. At the time, the only thing that made me feel better was telling my closest friends about how I felt (not the bit about not having a soul; I didn’t want to freak them out) and learning that I was actually not at all alone in feeling this existential anxiety.

Corporate careers: for love nor money

Somehow over Christmas I mustered the strength to apply for a PGCE in Classics, and the realisation that actually I adore Classics and want to spread the love of it (especially to state schools, who are currently far too deprived of it for my liking) and also that I’m okay at helping children with things has absolutely transformed my life and my happiness. Suddenly, now that I’m happy, I’m having all these ideas about things I would enjoy doing with my life! I want to be a teacher, yes, but maybe first I want to travel the world, meet people, maybe become a Mindfulness practitioner, ultimately become a psychotherapist when I develop the capacity for emotional detachment, do a PhD, perform the music I make by myself to other people – the list goes on. I cannot tell you how strange it is, what a joy it is, to have all these ideas.

So if you are a baby second-year or a floundering third-year experiencing what I experienced, my heart goes out to you. The love and the ideas are all inside you, waiting to be let free. You just have to take good enough care of yourself to let them out. If it’s shit right now, it’ll change for the better: I promise