One of the first things that they tell you when you say you want to be a radio presenter is that when the microphone light turns red, you just need to relax and be entirely yourself. Just be yourself! Except, after three years at university, I wasn’t exactly sure how to do that anymore.

I know that the trope for going to university is that you ‘find’ yourself, come out of your shell, and settle into the person that you’re going to be for most of your 20s. But whenever people have asked me how I found my degree, I tend to come back to them with a conflicted answer: on one hand, I insist that I had some really good times with some fabulous people because that’s true and I hate being negative, but frankly, overall my time at university left me with a tendency to retreat into my insecurities.

I want to say that it happened all of a sudden, but I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that I was going to wear outfits to cover my callipers, start to speak less in social situations, or suddenly feel the need for constant validation from my friends; it was a much more gradual process of feeling like I wasn’t enough for the people and situations I found myself surrounded by.

In some cases, it was specific things that individuals did which made me feel this way – both intentionally and unintentionally – but it was more the general vibe that didn’t suit me. For example, I went to a very normal state school in Bradford, but an aspect of that school that I’d never considered as being integral to how I thought about myself, was that it shared its premises and resources with a special needs school. So every day my fellow students and I walked past, spoke to, and sometimes shared classrooms with severely disabled children and therefore, became accustomed to seeing disability. Consequently, I might’ve had my shoes stared at every day, but subconsciously I didn’t feel unusual because I was never the only disabled kid around. I never thought about the importance of this at the time, but then when I went to a university where I struggled to access disabled parking spaces outside of the colleges or faculties, and where I only remember ever seeing two other visibly disabled students, the impact of that mixed secondary school environment on disabled and able-bodied people alike became startling.

Another area where I didn’t feel like I was enough was in my romantic relationship attempts and sometimes my friendships. To be honest, the theme of my romantic relationships has always been that either I’m not interested when they are or they’re not when I am, they’re in a relationship with someone else already and are just putting loads of tedium or confusion on me, or doing the classically non-committal ‘I like you, but let’s just sleep together’ thing – or we met on holiday and thus continuing anything is pointless. I have been known to shoot myself in the foot by prolonging pointless situations because of boredom or stubbornness as well. So a great combo all around then! But the not thinking I was enough for lads was definitely at its height at university; I knew I didn’t feel good about it, but I hadn’t realised the extent of the toll on my self-esteem until I went to a radio placement 15 minutes up the road in Newcastle and I was surprised to experience someone openly and unapologetically flirting with me. I remember walking away from that situation thinking ‘wow, I’m not actually unattractive then’.

But of all the types of insecurity I’ve felt in the last few years, it was the insecurity in friendships that cut me the deepest.

Honestly, it’s taken me months to come to terms with how beaten down I felt at university and how that had made me into someone who rarely ever felt secure in their relationships with anyone. I’ve always been a person who cares about others very deeply and intensely, I’m reliable and I try my best to be everything those close to me need. But no matter how hard you try, you can’t be everything all at once and it can be difficult to deal with the times when you fall short of that standard you’ve set for yourself. So there were many times over the last few years when I didn’t know what I was doing wrong or why I wasn’t enough for my friends, and this just pushed me further into myself.

Unfortunately, feeling like you’re not good enough is something all of us will experience at more than one point in our lives, no matter how hard we hit the self-care routines, and so the best treatment appears to be recognising when the nasty voice in your head is becoming way louder than it ever was before and doing things to shut it up again. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no guru when it comes to this kind of thing, but I think that I knew that my radgy internal voice had become too loud when I went travelling with one of my best friends and thanked her for being so considerate about my feet. She looked at me, surprised and offended that those words had even come out of my mouth, but it was a clear example of how I’d begun to feel like I had to apologise for everything that I am to try and appease my environment. Something you should never feel the need to do.

Since then, I graduated, so obviously I removed myself from the situation physically but it’s been more about rewiring my brain to trust my instincts, stop overthinking everything going on around me, and actively practise confidence again. And now, with the very normal occasional few blips of insecurity, I’m glad to say that I feel more myself than I have for years. I still have wonderful friends from university, and I wouldn’t want you to think that I never had any great times whilst I was there because that just wouldn’t be true, but I didn’t lose any sleep about my degree ending, put it that way.

You might think that that’s a shame and I suppose that it is, but sometimes life just doesn’t go the way you expect it to. That doesn’t make the change a failure or lack, it just is what it is. There’s plenty of fun still to be had in environments that won’t make me feel quite so self-conscious 80% of the time. And that sounds like a much stronger vibe to me.