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Were I not battling the awkward lethargy for which I had no explanation then — as yet undiagnosed — and the consequential emotions that wrecked many a relationship, I often wonder if I could have achieved a higher grade at university.

In my final year, I submitted an essay I put my heart and soul into. It paid off, sort off. One afternoon, my lecturer caught up with me in the corridors of our department. He told me it was one of the best essays he had read: a first class effort, he said, so clearly the fruit of extensive research. That was when he pleaded with me, begging me to furnish him with an excuse that would enable him to award me top marks. You see, I had submitted it late, rendering it totally worthless.

But that was really the tale of my entire experience at university. I was an emotional wreck, forever tired, weak and demotivated. In many lectures, I’d often spend the session doodling sketches of sports cars in the margins, instead of taking notes. To this day, I don’t honestly know if I was a moderately intelligent student who could have achieved top marks were it not for circumstances beyond my control. I didn’t know then that my body was producing no testosterone, the natural anabolic steroid responsible for strength, stamina, mood, confidence, memory, general cognition, and so much more.

In the end, I graduated with an upper second-class honours degree, which I’m told was a respectable grade. A grade that would probably have enabled me to easily slip into a good graduate job, were I not still dealing with those acute deficiencies which undermined any potential ambition and hindered my pursuit of opportunities. So, who knows, perhaps I might have achieved a first class degree in different circumstances.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that I finally began to make progress in seeking work once I received a diagnosis and was finally able to access interventions that would address some of its worst effects. Not that I pursued a graduate job at that point: I just needed to take anything. That was 2004, four years on from graduating from an MPhil programme, three years of which I had spent drifting between freelance work, manning an internet café and running a small restaurant in Mayfair.

If I say I started at the bottom and worked my way up, I really mean it. My first job in the NHS was in a patient records department, sticking barcode labels on manilla files. My two degrees counted for absolutely nothing, because I couldn’t sell myself. My next role was as office manager in a busy learning and development department: an admin role. The next one, office manager for an IT programme management team: it sounds grander than it was, for I was basically a personal assistant. But I suppose it set the groundwork for my eventual transition into IT services to commence my development pathway.

Such a circuitous route, when I could just have done an IT apprenticeship, and arrived at the same destination much earlier. But there we are: I was too busy screwing things up at college to investigate the onward path that might have helped me make sensible decisions. As it was, I didn’t even apply for university then, deciding instead that I was destined to fail. No matter. The route I ultimately took defined my life in other ways. For one thing, I found my faith during that period, and London became my natural home. Those two facets alone changed everything: without them, I would never have met my wife, and then everything would have been different.

I honestly don’t know if I could have achieved anything better than this. Without that ever-present brain fog, could I have achieved more? Perhaps so, but I wouldn’t exchange what I have today for that. I guess I just found my station: these great blessings, despite myself. Better to express gratitude for what we’ve been granted, than to spend a lifetime pondering, “What if?”