couldn't handle me anymore. Its not surprising. I couldn't handle them
at the time either.
I ended up in a children's home in the Harlesden area. I still kept
attending the private school I went to. I started doing my GCSE exams
while I was in there. They moved me to a foster family within a month or
two and I finished my GCSEs. It was during this period I saw a
psychiatrist for the first time and they diagnosed me sane: a young kid
trying to be who they were in a strict home where that wasn't
acceptable. They may have thought my exams and the stress was making me
act out though I don't feel like that was a problem at the time. I
wasn't really interested in my exams or the grades. Being thrown out of
home was useful because all I could do was revise to keep me occupied. I
got very good grades because of that - so much so that the family were
more impressed with my grades than my cousin who got straight A* grades.
Within a a few months I returned home. After that my parents packed me
off to boarding school. I don't remember if I was already going to a
boarding school or not when I was thrown out of home. Like anyone else I
didn't really want to go but was accepting of any fate having gone
through the process of my life disintegrating. In the home I'd quickly
accepted a poor outcome. The two years at boarding school were two of
the best years of my life and I met some amazing people. The school I
went to took a lot of weird people and children that other schools
wouldn't take - children that I'm sure in the future may be given
diagnoses and excluded into special schools. It was a very liberal and
lefty school and very different from the two other private schools I'd
been to. I could grow and grow away from the rigourous standards of my
parents.
I applied to do a degree in Electronic Engineering. I applied to all the
top UK universities apart from Oxford and Cambridge (those just weren't
me) and was accepted by all of them. Through the interview at Imperial
College - the number 2 place in the world for my course - I was put in
touch with the Year In Industry scheme (http://www.yini.org.uk/) which
seeks "captains of industry in 20 years time" and gives them gap year
work experience and accelerated training.
I ended up working in Farnborough for the National Remote Sensing Centre
(now http://www.infoterra-global.com/). I ended up working as a
programmer for an image satellite data dissemnination system. The
project was for a state of the art imaging satellite called the ENVISAT
and it was a multinational European Space Agency project. I helped out
the programmers but also learnt a lot about programming and computers at
a very high level as well as seeing how a project is managed.
I usually summarise this story to "I know someone who was in a
children's home when they were 15 and programming for a European Space
Agency satellite when they were 18 so anything can happen."
I leave out a lot of important detail in the one line summary that makes
it less of a positive story but I still feel there is a postiive point
to be taken: anything can happen. There's a lot of bad things that
happen of course but sometimes its worth shutting that negative voice up
and just enjoying the hope that positive things can happen for you too.
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