What does a high school dropout know?
For every mind the system misread — & the ones who thrived their own way
More than several lifetimes, but in the grand scheme of things not so long ago I was the kind of child that made some parents weirdly competitive at parent teacher meetings & had the children vacillate between wanting to be my best friend & wanting to slam my head between heavy doors. Most often it was both which was thoroughly discombobulating for mini me.
Yes the latter actually happened, yes it hurt.
Top of the class without ever trying too hard. Lead in the school play. Chief boy scout — no not brownies, boy scouts, a difference that said mini me always felt needed asserting. The only troop in England that accepts girls sat round the corner from our little London flat. I loved it & as with most things I enjoyed, I excelled at it. I was a gymnast who progressed faster than the programme anticipated & much faster than my fellow kid gymnasts wanted to cheer me on for. I was on television in adverts before I was old enough to have any kind of opinion about TV. The kind of child teachers described with phrases like ‘so much potential’, ‘gifted’ & yadayada.
I was also, for most of those early years, really, truly happy.
My first memories are painted in green & gold & Balearic blue. We moved between an island paradise & a quaint European city & then on to Texas & in each place I arrived curious, open & seemingly incapable of not throwing myself headfirst into whatever was available to try.
At 2 years old I stomped up to my mama (if she’s to be believed, I was wearing little more than her comically oversized on me then Doc Martens) & declared that I was going to be a singer. She said “okay tiny human, let’s see what we can do to help you get there.” She put up with me singing on trains & in supermarket queues & putting on performances at every family gathering. Not many years later we bounced down to a local performing arts group & she, in her cheeky stubborn ways convinced them to let me do a trial class even though they didn’t accept kids my age.
“just let her do one day, if she’s not fit for it, we’ll come back when she’s older.”
They did & at the end of that day they gave all of us tiny humans a full A4 page of poem — intended to be the only solo piece in the upcoming spring performance — which we were all supposed to learn for the next week. Next week when I showed up in my dungarees with bunches bouncing atop my blond head, a couple of years younger than everyone else, I was the only one who’d learned it. I absolutely loved the company & wound up progressing within it until I was 15 when I decided, I really didn’t want to do this after all.
Performing arts — modelling, acting, singing, dancing. Gymnastics, creative writing, painting, scouting, climbing, abseiling, pottery, sewing, reading. The list of my passions was practically endless. My mama, who had the opposite of pushy parent energy, who was in fact one of the most supportive humans I’ve ever encountered somehow… & I still don’t entirely understand the logistics of this given that we were not a wealthy family, found a way to let me try everything I was inspired to. & the things I loved I kept doing until I stopped loving them & then I tried something else.
It was a glorious, chaotic, golden way to grow up.
But at six years old we’d moved back to London where I was born. I stuck out like a fat gold thumb & everything got quite a bit more complicated.
London didn’t know what to do with me & I didn’t know what to do with it. I was a child shaped by island light & European pace & the freedom of community amongst travellers that incited my little soul had been built for wandering — & suddenly I was in a very big, very grey city that moved too fast, held a lot of very hurt people & cared too much about things I didn’t understand yet.
The bullying started almost immediately. My best understanding of it, looking back, is that it was for the oldest & most boring of reasons — I was happy, good at things & I was naive enough to believe that everyone, like me, just wanted to make another person smile. I didn’t yet understand that on the playground, in fact even in adult life this combination can make you a target.
I also didn’t yet understand that I was growing up in a home that most people would consider more than a little complicated.
My mama & her partner were addicts. I need to be careful here because I have no interest in your pity & even less in reducing them to this single fact — they were the most functioning junkies you’ve ever met, capable of extraordinary love & extraordinary presence & extraordinary creativity. I was cycled to school every day with both of us singing, there was no lack of support, warmth, hygiene or anything else we tend to picture when we imagine a child raised by those dependant on a substance. But by the time I was twelve my mama was supremely sick. By thirteen she was on life support.
Suffice to say the colours of my world had changed considerably.
The dropout
At thirteen, somewhere in the accumulation of all of the above — the bullying, my mama’s illness, a steadily worsening relationship with myself that had taken the form of self harm & an eating disorder, a newfound love of being anything but sober & a somewhat fractured relationship with reality — I stopped going to school.
It wasn’t immediate, it was more like a slow fade. For maybe 6 months I’d go to school, usually early, sign in for morning registration & 3 days out of 5, walk straight back out the gates afterwards.. laughably I was bunking off school to go hang out at bookstores & libraries & okay fine to go smoke weed with my friends too. My attendance dwindled to an obscenely low percentage & eventually I decided my life was actually big & messy & loud enough that I didn’t need to be going somewhere that wasn’t challenging me intellectually but supremely challenged me socially.
They had tried to move me forward a year when I was nine. The same year they kept calling my mama in pestering her that I wasn’t doing homework… to which she always replied “how are her grades?” They were immaculate & so she pointed out with no subtlety & a little sass the women in my family just can’t escape, that it was possible I was actually learning what I needed to during my school hours so could probably skip doing extra work on the same things at home.
I turned the opportunity down. Even at nine I understood that being a ten year old in high school was not going to help remove the bullseye from my back, I figured (probably correctly) that it would only make it larger & more visible. It was one of the more pragmatic decisions of my young life & nobody gave me credit for it at the time. My mama, bless her just said “Okay if that’s what you really want.”
By thirteen I had made the much less pragmatic decision of simply opting out entirely & for a while nobody noticed because I had the smarts to pass end of year exams, was good at performing & the world around me was otherwise occupied.
At fourteen social services got involved. A newly filled roster of shrinks & psychiatrists arrived alongside them — most of whom seemed primarily interested in pointing blame at my mama, who to be clear was not just my mother. She was my safe place, my sister & my best friend. & this blame I found not just unhelpful but genuinely infuriating. Nobody seemed interested in the fact that I had my own considerable shit going on quite independently of hers.
Social services decreed I couldn’t simply do nothing. I certainly wasn’t doing nothing, I was partying, hanging out with friends, all of whom were a few years older than me & in similarly complicated teenage scenes. But they were adamant I couldn’t just not go to school & I was adamant I wasn’t going back.
So they suggested I start attending a city learning centre near where we lived.
The teacher who saw me
It was four hours, a couple of times a week. Easy enough. So easy that a part of me resented it & another part of me desperately needed it.
My first day, the teacher asked what I liked doing & I told her I love to write.
“Great. Write me something.”
So I did. I have no recollection what it was about. My generally precise memory is of these years, a sleepless, calorie scarce blur. I handed it to her at the end of the four hours & went on my way.
When I came back the following Thursday she didn’t even say hi, she just said
“Write me something else.”
So I did.
The week after that she pulled me aside & asked if I understood where I was. I looked at her the way teenagers look at adults asking stupid questions.
“…The city learning centre in Camden.”
“Well yes. But this is a centre for people with learning disabilities. You really shouldn’t be here. Would you mind doing some tests for me?”
So for the next couple of weeks, every Tuesday & Thursday, I did exams. What I didn’t fully realise at the time was that they were advancing in difficulty, incrementally & carefully, all the way up to university level.
She contacted a college nearby. Told me I’d been accepted to do a foundational degree & that I could choose what I wanted to study. So at fifteen, that same autumn, I started college — studying performing arts with a minor in creative writing. The two things I’d been convinced since childhood were all I wanted to do.
I actually loved going to college, being the young one there in too much eyeliner was kind of a high but it taught me pretty quickly, that I no longer lusted to have my life ruled by performing arts.
Every time I got on stage I was overcome with crumbling anxiety. I found none of the joy I’d always found in standing in the spotlight. I wanted in many ways to disappear. I had stopped self harming & the effect was that my eating disorder had taken a drastically dark turn, one that the following year would see me hit 31kg ft. thinning hair & blackouts — I was disappearing, before everyone’s eyes & I wanted it that way.
India, the island & healing
It took going to India at sixteen to begin to really heal any of it. I arrived somewhere in the early stages of recovery but deeply struggling & left a little over a month later with a kind of golden glow about me. A glow I’d forgotten existed somewhere in my late childhood when I had sort of skipped the tween & teen years & gone straight for messy grown up life.
I won’t compress that trip into a neat paragraph because it doesn’t deserve one. Suffice to say that what happened there was the beginning of a long, extraordinarily worthwhile study of myself. Of the body. Of the mind. Of the relationship between the two that I would spend the next fifteen years — well more, since it’s present to this day — exploring in every way available to me.
I went back to London. Got a job. Felt my newly healed self beginning to spiral back toward old toxic patterns — the way an environment teeming with years of bad habits can unravel a person regardless of how much work they’ve done. I told my mama I was leaving, travelled Europe through that summer & at the ripe old age of seventeen packed up some boxes & shipped myself to the island I’d always felt was home. The island where my mama too had grown up, that she’d had her own valid reasons for leaving.
Perhaps that’s just the nature of hometowns, we accumulate a need to escape & then spend years figuring out wherever we go… well, there we are & have to discern what we were actually running away from & what it is we want to run towards.
From there I worked my butt off in the Spanish summers, travelled mostly Asia in the winters & I studied. Not in any institution. Not any one specific topic. Just voraciously, in the way that had always come most naturally to me — following curiosity wherever it led. Using any & every learning tool I came across on the wide web & deep in the tomes I’d always loved immersing myself in.
Writing, from journalism to poetry. Photography. Physiology. Anthropology. Biomechanics of breathwork. Anatomy. Yoga asana. Yoga philosophy. The neuroscience of habit & nervous system regulation. Grief. The immune system. The gut biome. The intelligence of the body when it’s finally given permission to speak. This list is unfinished because it’s incredibly long & I’m still adding things to it.
Svadhyaya & the study that’s never stopped
In Sanskrit philosophy there’s a concept called svadhyaya.
It’s usually translated as self study — one of the niyamas, the personal observances of yogic practice. But its meaning is broader & more interesting than simple introspection. Svadhyaya encompasses the study of sacred texts, but also the study of oneself as a text, the study of oneself learning, which we all are, basically all the time. The ongoing, curious, non-judgemental observation of who you are, how you work, what you need & what you’re capable of.
It is in other words, the opposite of what the school system asked of me.
The school system wanted me to be assessed. Categorised. Told what I was & wasn’t capable of based on criteria that had very little to do with how my mind actually worked. It wanted me to fit in to one of a few acceptable boxes.
Svadhyaya asks something different. It asks you to become the student of your own experience. To treat your life, your patterns, your resistances, your obsessions, your inexplicable capacities as the curriculum.
Looking back, I understand now that I’ve never stopped practicing svadhyaya. Even in the years when I was doing my absolute worst by most external metrics — the dropout years, the disappearing years, the years when a great deal of what I was studying about myself was painful & difficult & nothing I’d have chosen — I was learning. Constantly, compulsively, in the only way that has ever really worked for me.
Through living it.
& it must be said those darker years were rapid & valuable learning for me. I wouldn’t be the woman I am today without them. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone & yet in my own journey they meant I got a great deal of hard, important shit out of the way young. They gave me a level of eye contact, connection & empathy that I genuinely don’t think can be studied into existence.
I’ve never met a soul who astounded me with the lightness of their being who hasn’t been through a ringer or six. The two things aren’t unrelated.
It’s not just me
It’s worth saying that I didn’t arrive at this brand of unconventional entirely alone. I come from a long line of highly intelligent humans who were, to varying degrees less than ideally served by standard institutions.
My uncle is perhaps my favourite example. Another high school dropout who last I heard was curing cancer or some such universally important thing in a laboratory gifted to him by Johns Hopkins University — which is, I think we can all agree, a fairly compelling argument against the idea that being a dropout has much to do with intelligence or in fact a problem when a human drops out of a system that isn’t supporting them.
The schooling system as we know it is an old machine. It was designed for a different century, a different economy & a different understanding of how human minds actually work. For some children it’s fine, they fit the shape of it & the shape of it fits them & everyone gets along reasonably well.
For others it’s like being handed a violin & assessed on your ability to play the trumpet — The instrument isn’t wrong, the assessment is.
What I’d argue we desperately need & what I was lucky enough to find through a combination of an incredibly supportive mother alongside a second family I was blessed to exist within for many of my adult years, a lot of independent study & a life lived at full tilt plus a whole lot of serendipity, isn’t a better version of the same system. It’s the courage to question whether the system is the right one for this mind, at this moment.
Socialisation matters enormously. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But as someone who had an extraordinarily full youth — gymnastics, performing arts, scouting, travel, languages, communities in multiple countries — I can tell you that meaningful socialisation doesn’t require eight hours a day in a room being taught to answer things correctly rather than question things intelligently & intuitively.
The plot thickens
At twenty seven, after some years of working as a yoga teacher & breathwork coach & building a life that largely felt & probably looked, like someone who had figured themselves out — I discovered I’m autistic.
I want to sit with that for a moment because I know what you’re thinking. She was top of every class. She was lead in the school play. She had heightened social skills & deep empathy & the kind of warmth that made strangers talk to her on buses. She was just about the last kid anyone thought to neurologically assess.
Yes. All of that & also autistic.
In my very brief time on TikTok several summers ago a girl popped up on my screen & asked if I understood that being able to read & write before the age of two wasn’t normal because she hadn’t & her therapist had just diagnosed her as hyperlexic… off the app I popped because hey, I was reading & writing before two.
‘An avid fascination & aptitude for words. Exceptional memory, advanced reading skills & focus on visual-spatial tasks. Most often a splinter trait of autism.’
I tuned my mouth to a hm of acknowledgment, filed it away in one of my many mental boxes, this one labelled ‘random interesting things’ & carried on with my Saturday.
But not too long later another video appeared — a call out to all the women who were little girls fascinated by literature, acting, anthropology… who are now discovering they are in fact autistic & were just learning how to human.
I was more than a little floored. She had just listed a chunk of my fixations as a child.
As I love to do, I did a bunch of research & over the following months accepted I was indeed neurospicy before sitting down one day at 6am to take the test. A test that like our definition of autism definitely needs an update but did confirm I have low flying neurodivergence.
This is the part where I get to tell you that we have collectively done a spectacular job of misunderstanding what neurodivergence actually looks like — in girls especially, in children who have learned to mask so thoroughly that even they don’t know they’re doing it.
The presentation that gets spotted, that gets the early intervention, the support & the understanding, tends to be one specific kind. Struggling socially, struggling academically, temper tantrums & so on, those clearly finding the world difficult to navigate.
The presentation that gets missed, that gets called gifted & then gets called troubled & then gets called burned out without anyone connecting the dots. That presentation looks a startling lot like me.
A child who learns in great leaps rather than steady linear progressions. Who is passionate to the point of obsession about the things that capture her & entirely unable to manufacture interest in the things that don’t. Who finds certain social environments electric & others completely overwhelming with no obvious explanation for the difference. Who has an internal world so vivid that the external one sometimes struggles to compete.
The neuroscience of this is genuinely fascinating & I’d encourage you to look into it if any of this is ringing bells but what I want to say here is simpler than any clinical definition.
Knowing changed everything. Not because it gave me an excuse, I basically went from knowing what I’d always known — that I’m a bit of a special sunflower to understanding what field I was grown in. It gave me a framework. An extra set of tools. A way of understanding why certain things that seemed straightforward for everyone else had always required a different kind of approach for me. Why certain environments & structures & demands produced unexplainable resistance & others lit me up like the houses of a small American town at Christmas time. I even understood why I’d always loved singing so much & why even after I left performing arts I continue to be a person who sings whilst she walks down the street or busies herself at work, especially when it’s a stressful day — simple vagal toning, my body intuitively regulating my nervous system. One living in a world not particularly well built for it.
It turned out this dropout hadn’t failed the system, the system had failed to account for the dropout.
What this means for my son
I think about all of this differently now that I have a baby. He’s 8 months old & already I find myself watching him with the curiosity & fantasy of someone who has spent years studying how minds work & who knows, from the inside, what it feels like when a mind is misread.
I don’t know yet what kind of mind he’ll have. I don’t know if he’ll be the child who thrives in a classroom or the one who needs a different kind of container entirely. I don’t know if he’ll have an aptitude for music or sports or both, if he’ll hate rules or thrive under them, if he’ll excel at something doldrum or want to do something nobody has invented yet.
What I do know is what my mama gave me — the freedom to try everything & the permission to stop when something stopped being right. At six I went to a ballet class & we’d barely exited the building before I told her “that’s not dancing, there are too many rules.” & that was the end of ballet. No argument, no insistence that I give it more time, no disappointment. Just “okay, what’s next?”
Turned out I liked contemporary, hip-hop, tango & breakdancing.
That gift is the thing I most want to give him.
I’m actively trying to build a life — which is part of why this Substack exists, part of why the books exist, part of why I’m writing at midnight between feeds instead of sleeping like someone who is as tired as myself — that would allow me to homeschool him or find some alternative to the standard model. Not because I think school is universally wrong. But because I know what it looks like when a mind is forced through a machine that wasn’t built for it.
& what me & babydaddy agree on more loudly & clearly than anything. Is that we’d like him to have options. More options than we had.
The five year old with the pale blue pages
Recently my stepdad read one of my articles. He’s known me since I was a babe. He was there for the dropout years, the extremely troubled years, the years when the adults in my life were doing their best to figure out what on earth to do with me.
He sent me a text with laughing curiosity —
“What university did you go to?” Knowing full well the answer.
None. The university of life if we’re being poetic about it. Which apparently given the question confers a reasonably decent degree. No cap, no gown, just a masters in the mess.
I think about the five year old version of myself who wrote a story on pale blue pages & took black ribbon from my mama’s art box to bind it into a book. The small adamant blonde thing who flourished her proud creation at her mama & said “I’m going to be a writer” with the certainty of someone who the world hasn’t yet ingrained a sense of what they can & can not do. Which I’ll be honest — I’ve had everyone from drunks in bars to CEO’s ask how I got it into my head to leave school, heard how everyone wants to but you can’t a hundred times — & I don’t have a better answer than I’ve never had all that clear a grasp on the concept of can’t.
That little blond thing brandishing her first bound authored work wasn’t misguided.
She was just taking the scenic route & it turns out the scenic route, for some of us, is the only one worth taking.
If this or any of my work has been useful to you & you’d like to keep me caffeinated or support a slightly feral, very passionate new mamacita without any commitment
This is a powerful essay because it refuses the easy story that dropping out meant the absence of learning. What emerges instead is a life of intense self-study, curiosity, survival, adaptation, and hard-won understanding, shaped by books, travel, body wisdom, grief, neurodivergence, and the rare gift of being allowed to keep searching for the form that fit.
I was especially struck by the teacher who saw you clearly enough to realize the learning centre had misread you, because that moment captures the whole essay in miniature: the right witness can interrupt the wrong label. Your reflection on svadhyaya gives the piece its deeper architecture, since the real curriculum became your own experience, patterns, resistance, capacities, and becoming.
Grateful for this honest and expansive reminder that some minds are not broken by taking the scenic route; they are finally given enough room to reveal what the straight road could not hold.
When I read this, the first feeling I had was just to give you a big digital hug. You are a truly beautiful human :). The crazy thing is I've just been thinking about how the educational institutions we have right now are seriously behind what is possible. Your discussion of svadhyaya and how you've always been doing that no matter what your status was in the "school system" shows that you are actually doing it because you enjoy it. Living your life intentionally and not just following what the system tells you to do.
Rock on sister!