The Support I Never Reached For

I never reached out during any of my degrees.

Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was a lack of awareness. Maybe it was fear. Or maybe I simply believed I should be able to do it alone. At the time, that seemed like the noble approach — head down, keep going, figure it out yourself.

Looking back now, I realise something quite striking. During every degree I completed, I was eligible for reasonable adjustments and the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA). In other words, the support was there. The safety net had already been strung beneath the tightrope.

But I never stepped onto it.

Instead, I walked the tightrope alone.

To be fair, my degrees didn’t go terribly. In fact, academically they went reasonably well. From the outside looking in, everything probably appeared fine. But the experience itself was often much harder than it needed to be.

Behind the scenes it was messy.

There were last-minute sprints to deadlines that felt more like emergency evacuations than planned journeys. There were long stretches of procrastination and avoidance where work sat untouched, quietly building pressure in the background. There was disengagement — moments where I felt mentally checked out but physically present.

And then there was the mask.

Each day I would show up, play the role, and perform competence. Sometimes it felt like I was competing for an Oscar just to make it through the day. It reminds me of The Truman Show (Weir, 1998), where the main character lives inside a world that appears perfectly normal on the surface, yet deep down something feels slightly out of place. He continues playing his role because that’s what he believes he’s supposed to do.

University can sometimes feel a bit like that.

On the outside everything looks fine — lectures attended, assignments submitted, conversations in the corridor. But internally there can be uncertainty, pressure, and the quiet sense that you’re performing more than you’re actually thriving.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that support isn’t a sign of weakness. It never was.

If anything, the opposite is true.

Support is a sign of strength.

Reaching out requires something far more difficult than struggling silently. It requires honesty. It requires self-awareness. It requires the willingness to admit that the current way of doing things isn’t working as well as it could.

In other words, reaching out means you care.

It means you’re not content to drift along in survival mode. It means you want to build something better rather than simply endure what’s already there.

When I look back now, I sometimes wonder how different the experience might have been if I had reached out earlier. Not because my degrees were failures — they weren’t — but because the journey could have felt less like running a marathon with no water stations.

University can already feel like climbing a mountain. The work is demanding, the path isn’t always clear, and the weather changes quickly. Support services, mentoring, and adjustments are not shortcuts to the top. They’re more like the guide ropes and rest points along the route.

They don’t climb the mountain for you.

But they stop the climb from becoming unnecessarily brutal.

There’s also a powerful cultural myth around independence, especially in higher education. Many students feel they should be able to manage everything themselves. Asking for help can feel like admitting failure.

But independence was never meant to mean isolation.

Even the most successful climbers rely on teams, maps, and equipment. Nobody scales Everest by simply deciding they should be able to manage it alone.

Looking back now, I realise I spent a lot of time rowing the boat with one oar when there was another one sitting beside me the whole time.

Support was there.

I just never picked it up.

That’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about encouraging students to access the support available to them. Because I’ve seen both sides of it — the lonely tightrope walk and the stronger path where people allow themselves the tools they’re entitled to.

Reaching out doesn’t mean you’re failing.

It means you’re building a better way forward.

References:

The Truman Show (1998) Directed by Peter Weir. USA: Paramount Pictures.