Ben & Books

Normally I only ever post about books, but today I would like to talk about something very different to that; me. I find it quite difficult to talk about myself, but I feel that the journey I have had over the last decade is one that may be interesting enough to write down. Maybe people will learn something from it, maybe someone will see this and be inspired to start their own journey. Admittedly it isn’t the most exciting story you will ever read, but it is mine, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Ten years ago, I was struggling through what I hope was the worst time of my life. Unemployed and stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of sending hundreds of job applications that ultimately ended with either silence or a failed interview, it felt like there was no hope. Every rejection email, every pointless CV writing course, every judging stare in the jobcentre hurt infinitely more than the last, and I am ashamed to say that I felt like giving up in more than one occasion.

I had a very complicated relationship with education. Bullied throughout school, to the point where my final two years were spent desperately trying to find ways to avoid the place, inevitably I left with zero qualifications and somehow even less confidence. For the next few years, my feeble attempts at further education ended in the same way, failure. Even the vaguest dream of university felt like an impossibility. Although I had always wanted to go to university, I found myself finding new excuses to avoid even trying. First, I was too stupid, I had no qualifications and no way to improve that. Second, I was too shy, university is a social experience as well as an educational one, and there’s no way I’d survive that. Finally, then I was too late, I had waited too long and there was no way I could do it now. I was wrong.

In late 2015, I decided to give it a try. I decided that I would get into university, no matter how difficult or stressful it would be. I looked up pathways into universities and decided, whatever courses I needed to do, whatever difficulties I was going to face, that I would find a way there. After all, if I failed it wouldn’t change anything, but if I succeeded, it would change everything.

It is now July 2025, and next week I will complete a MA in Publishing. In the decade since I made that decision, I have gone from unemployed to having had the same job for the last seven years. I have gone from never leaving the house to traveling across the country regularly for fun. And I have gone from having such low confidence that I couldn’t make a phone call to performing poetry and giving talks to college students. There have been setbacks of course, I have lost some dear friends, and there was the pandemic that we all had to suffer through. But I have also made countless new friends, built up my confidence massively, and reignited my love of reading over these years, all because a decade ago, I made the decision to try.

For years I believed I wasn’t good enough, I believed there were so many things were an impossibility for me to achieve, and I believed the words of cruel people when they put me down. And this is why I chose to write this. If you are reading this and you are in the same position I was in a decade ago, if you think you are not good enough, not confident enough to succeed, if you feel like it is too late to follow your dreams, know that this is not true. It doesn’t matter what people say, what your past says, and it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve travelled around the sun, all that matters is you. whether you are 17 or 70, Go to university, write that book, learn that new skill, all that matters is you make that decision to try. Looking back to ten years ago, I barely recognise the person I was back then, and I only hope that in 2035, I will be able to look back to today and see the same progress.