“Don’t you have to be clever to do a PhD?” More than a decade later, I can still instantly recall the effect these cutting words had on me. But they hadn’t come from a stranger but from one of my best friends, someone I’d known since childhood. There were four of us in our group, and we bonded through school, college, university and raucous holidays in Majorca. We were then in our early 20s, searching for what everyone wanted at that age – love, success, meaning and attention.

I was unsure of my future, hence casually throwing out the idea of doing a PhD. They trained in law, physiotherapy and education, all respected paths with pay grades, promotion opportunities and permanent contracts. Inside, I knew that my true dream was to work in the media, but the competitiveness of our friendship group made that decision seem worthless.

I canned the PhD talk and started trying to break into the TV industry. I found it hard to explain that I’d work a studio shoot for one week, then be in an office or on location. I never knew ahead of time where I’d be, which made meeting up almost impossible, and when we did I was exhausted.

The dynamic was further complicated by the fact that I had extremely poor mental health: I was anxious, depressed, and dealing with the symptoms of as-yet-undiagnosed OCD. All of this was exacerbated by the financial toll of working unpaid or low-paid jobs while enduring the constant rejection of the media industry. “Why don’t you just try meditating?” asked one of my friends when I confided that I was finding things difficult, her comment over-simplifying a problem that took years to fix.

“I avoided my friends because I felt like a failure”: what it’s like when your friends have levelled up