when I became better at exams, being ‘academic’ was something that wormed its way into my identity and into how I saw myself. I was rewarded and praised for it. This was beneficial in some ways – I worked hard because I wanted to keep on succeeding – but it also came with some negatives attached. It’s never a particularly good idea to build your sense of self on the shaky foundations of academic merit. The older you get, the more you realise that such markers are pretty arbitrary – especially in the arts subjects I’d chosen to pursue.
The author Jessie Burton came to this realisation as an adult after a lifetime spent doing well at school and cultivating ‘an intellectual maturity [that] can mask vulnerability’.
In her thirties, ‘I’d never, perhaps, tuned in emotionally. And I do think it has come from a more or less self-imposed state of doing. Doing things that garner applause or garner approval and therefore make me feel safe.
‘I think it was a pattern that was made way back when I was young and doing well at school and for most children, that’s our life … at age five, we’re at school a lot more than probably we’re at home … and that was always rewarding me. I did enjoy school; I loved it. And feeling that there was a formula there of working hard and getting the results and getting everyone’s approval and everything in the status quo being maintained.’
The flip side of this was that Burton ‘felt a lot of the love I got was conditional [on doing well academically] … and when The Miniaturist [her first novel] was hugely successful, the biggest success I’ve ever had, it was almost too much. “Well, I’ve tried to write a book and, oh, it’s an international bestseller.” What now? Who am I?’
As Burton so perceptively outlined, school achievements and exam results are only ever external validations. In my experience, they do not make you feel confident in any long-lasting way because, by the time you’ve left school or graduated from university, you realise that there are no exams left to take unless you’re an architect or a doctor or one of those high-flying financial types who keep having to sit complicated accountancy tests.
When you’re a grown-up, life becomes bafflingly free of signposts. There is no exam board telling you whether you’re doing well or meeting the necessary requirements for being a twenty-five-year-old. There’s no one who can give you an A* for moving house efficiently or managing to file your tax return on time. Sure, you can be given promotions and pay rises, but these are often scattered and random events. There is no long, anticipatory build-up of revision to an eventual climax of essay-writing against the clock as an invigilator walks up and down between rows of desks and tells you that you have five minutes left.
In adulthood, no one gives you marks for getting the answer right.
I wish I’d been more aware of this. At seventeen, I thought exams were all-important. I got my work in on time and I prided myself on being good. Good at school. Good at debating. Good at behaving. Good at not smoking a cigarette until my eighteenth birthday, and then only taking a single drag because it seemed a symbolic thing to do. Good at not getting my ears pierced. Good at talking to adults. Good at seeming outwardly confident, despite the rumbling internal engine of anxiety. I was even fairly good at the trumpet – as long as I didn’t have to take a test (I managed Grade 6 before realising there is nothing more stressful than a music exam which requires you to stand in front of a stranger, regulate your shallow breathing, and blow loudly into a brass tube blindly hoping to hit the right note and realising there is nowhere to hide if you don’t). Still, I was good at being the school Orchestra Secretary, which was the next best thing.
But then I took my driving test. And I failed.
No big deal, you might think. Worse things happen at sea. But this failure hit me especially hard. It came at a time when I was passing all the other tests in my life, and applying to Cambridge University, where I would later get a place. These socially sanctioned successes had led to a belief that I could do things I set my mind to because – let’s not mince words here – I was spoiled. I was white, middle-class, had attentive parents and had won a scholarship to an excellent boarding school where opportunities were handed out like doughnuts at break-time (we did actually get doughnuts every Thursday). I thought that if I put enough time in, worked hard, did my best and if my parents threw money at any given problem, success would automatically follow. It was the logic of entitlement and I’m aware that countless people from different backgrounds, who have experienced discrimination for everything from their ethnicity to their sexuality, will find this a curiously slight example. And it was. But it’s the slightness that revealed the sheer depth of my arrogance.
I was arrogant about my driving test. Not because I thought I was an exceptional driver – I really, really wasn’t and my lack of spatial awareness means I can still barely parallel park – but because I thought success in tests was a perfect equation of effort multiplied by intelligence equals reward. I also knew that all my family – mother, father and older sister – had passed their test first time. In fact, my sister was a driver of such skill that later she took an Advanced Driving Test in order to qualify for lower insurance premiums and a lifetime of making all her romantic partners feel slightly emasculated (she’s also an excellent map-reader, motorcyclist, pilot and shooter of rifles, having once represented her country in precisely this sport. My cousins, not without reason, call her Jane Bond).
Being the youngest in a high-achieving family means you’re left scrabbling to keep up. In many ways, this was a gift – it gave me determination and a die-hard work ethic. In other ways, it meant I was more likely to take it to heart when I failed in areas that my parents or sister had already succeeded.
So it was with the driving test. Having done twenty lessons with long-suffering Bob, my driving instructor and a man blessed with the innate calmness and patience of a Buddhist monk, I felt wholly prepared. I had passed my theory test after swotting up on motorway lights and highway road signs. All that was left was the practical element – and how hard could that be?
Pretty hard, as it turned out.
I was paired with a stern-faced female examiner, the sort of person whose head seemed to have been chipped off an Easter Island statue, except less expressive. She was impervious to any effort at small talk or charm. Well, that’s fine, I thought, I’ll just drive brilliantly and she’ll be forced to crack a smile by the end.
For the first twenty minutes, everything went according to plan. I can honestly say, with the benefit of over two decades of driving cars, that it was quite possibly the best bit of driving I have ever done. Three-point turns were executed seamlessly. The emergency stop was deftly handled. Roundabouts held no fear. I indicated with grace, checked my wing mirrors as if born to the task and bowled smoothly along the roads trailed by songbirds whistling a merry tune.
Then, on our return to the test centre, the instructor motioned that I should go up a steep hill. I chuckled to myself. Hill starts were my forte. I’d learned to drive in Malvern, which is renowned for two things: its spring water and its gradients. Back at home in Ireland, we lived at the bottom of a valley. Navigating inclines was a way of life.
The car chuntered up to the brow of the hill. At the top, there was a traffic light and a column of cars waiting to turn into the main road. I slowed, stopped and pulled on the handbrake with full force. But then – calamity! – the car rolled back. It was just a few centimetres, and I stopped before hitting the car behind, but I already knew this was an automatic fail. Despite the blemish-free drive up to this point, I was going to be judged on this single moment of not-good-enough.
I drove back to the test centre and saw Bob, peering hopefully at me from the car park. I gave him a shake of the head and could tell he was already gearing up to say it can’t have been that bad.
The examiner turned to me, un-clicked her seatbelt and uttered the words ‘I regret to inform you …’ as if she were a telegram boy delivering news of a dead soldier on the Western Front. I slumped out of the car and Bob patted me on the arm and said it was just a bit of bad luck. He drove me back to school, where I used up what was left of my BT charge card to wail down the phone at my mother, who was nonplussed by my disproportionately melodramatic reaction.
‘It’s