Results Day and How To Be Happy
Happy A-Level results day, or, for me, happy 5-year anniversary of A-Level results day...
I’m aware that those people who still read this blog (I am led to believe that Tumblr sort of forces it under your eyes) do so primarily because they are interested in what university life is/was like, at Oxford or elsewhere. And a large proportion of that readership will be going into school today to harvest the fruits of a few hours’ (or a few years, depending on your diligence) labour.
When I received my results five years ago, I don’t remember any particularly grand feelings. I hadn’t got the grades to match my Oxford offer, so there wasn’t any relief. But, at the same time, I hadn’t messed it up all too badly – I was close and I knew that I still had a chance. A couple of fairly frantic phone calls to the admissions office later, the ship had been righted. Even then, I don’t think there was any outpouring of emotion: I was looking ahead to the coming year – a long 12 months out of education where I intended to catch up with my age group, being only 17 at the time – and seeing nothing more than empty weeks on my own.
I didn’t raise a glass of champagne on results day. I just felt frustrated to be trapped in that hinterland between outright success and outright failure, a middle ground so blurry that it inevitably comes with a dose of seasickness. Even after I had successfully negotiated the terms of my arrival in Oxford, I was unsure how to proceed. From that results day back in 2010, right up to the moment we pulled into Pembroke Square the next September, I was umming and ahhing about what I really wanted, what I really needed. Hundreds and hundreds of times over those months I imagined a future for myself that didn’t involve university. Those futures were always different – I had no clear goals or ambitions – but they were seductively immediate. The alternative, as I saw it, was to spend another 3 years tossing, turning, and drifting further into the uncertain waters of not knowing what you want from life.
If you can feel relief on results day, do so. That’s definitely the best way to feel. Maybe you’re delighted at the end of formal education. Maybe you’re chuffed to have met your offer. Maybe you’re ecstatic because you smashed it and got 15 A*s and have won a scholarship to study Divine Omnipotence at Harvard. These are all really great, really positive emotions to be feeling.
And if you feel disappointed by your results, that’s also fine. You know where you are, even if it’s not where you want to be. If you miss your offer, you miss your offer. Nobody’s born to go to a certain university and the world will always make space and reform according to the movement of the tides. If you got a B in English and you wanted an A, never mind. You’re still gonna write the next Jane Eyre because, let’s face it, it’s not gonna be written by the AQA examiners.
And if, like I was, you’re stuck in the space between cheering and crying, don’t stress about it. The worst thing you can do is to second or third or fourth or fifth guess yourself. I spent a year (maybe longer, if the opening entries of this blog are to be believed) thinking that I wasn’t cut out for being at university, and I was wrong about that. But if I’d decided, on that results day in 2010, to forsake further education and go out and pursue my dream of fronting an indie rock band, that would’ve be fine too. It would, at least, have been definitive. The problem with visualising all these futures for yourself is that you get trapped in a constant cycle of analysis and comparison, and you’ll only end up disappointed that, in the end, you only get one future. That’s the sad lot of the human mortal.
So enjoy results day – it’s the last time that something will really be riding on your exam performance, because your university degree will likely be a foregone conclusion. Enjoy being young and feeling sick to the pit of your stomach. Enjoy congratulating your friends whilst secretly resenting them. Enjoy getting ready to leave home next month. Enjoy the weeks of nervous anticipation, preparation and rehearsal for a few years of faking it. And then enjoy turning up and doing whatever it is you’ve gotta do.
In semiotics, people talk of signs, made of two parts. The lily is the signifier and death is the signified. It’s a simple, subliminal communication between a thing and our understanding of that thing. Those letters on the results sheet, the words spoken by your teacher, are the signifier. They signify a million different possibilities, so long as you can deconstruct the message. Good art undermines and inverts our understanding of signs, so that a set of bad grades don’t equal a bad life, and a set of good grades don’t equal a good life. Remember that the sign always has two parts, and you can choose what is signified.
And after you’ve done that bit of Semiotics for Dummies, have a beer and watch Homes Under The Hammer. You’ve earned it.
