Taking my time at university helped me overcome my fear of failure and accept myself

As the first person in my family to attend university, navigating tertiary education was an exercise in patience, uncertainty and confusion.

My parents, Lebanese immigrants, did all they could to foster in me a love for education and higher learning, and really believed I could and should be a lawyer or a doctor or something else equally respectable and highly paid.

But for me, it was not a simple journey. I was diagnosed with anxiety, dropped out of my second degree, and later discovered I was gay.

All in all, it has taken eight years of on-and-off-again study to get here. And for me, that was exactly the amount of time I needed.

Things didn’t quite go to plan

What I wish someone had told me before all of this is that everyone moves at…