Aug 14, 2012

Drama of results day will quickly fade into insignificance

Hannah Ryan

Staff Writer

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My first anxious scan down the page, when I eventually managed to extract it from its clammy envelope, yielded only a meaningless index of numbers and letters. A helpful friend, realising that my state of hysterical nervousness would inevitably lead to a botched calculation and some expletives that I would later regret, quickly whipped out a calculator and delivered to me my fate.

I walked out of the school feeling lighter than I had on any of the thousand other days I had done so. A Clare FM reporter greeted me at the gate with a face ready to express pity or joy, as appropriate. She asked me if I was happy. Where normally I would have been self-conscious, the giddy relief I was experiencing over-rode everything else and I enthused – perhaps excessively – definitely excessively – about just how happy I was, how excited to be heading out for the bright lights of Trinity.

This shiny bubble of ecstatic relief lasted for all of about 10 minutes, before reality sunk in. What would otherwise have been a wistful, slow-mo pan-view of the school which I had frequented since the age of 13, proved instead a vision of desolation. All around me people were teary-eyed, wailing over scrunched-up sheets of paper as irate, indignant parents gestured around for someone to blame.

The fact is, for all the work that I put in during the Leaving Cert– and it was a hard-earned achievement – I was still one of the lucky ones. Sure, I saw classmates who hadn’t lifted a finger, but I also saw some who had made it a habit of studying well into the early hours of those sweltering May and June mornings, so desperate were they to claw their way up the points-ladder to the level their ambitions demanded – confronting a second-choice CAO offer, or possibly a repeat year. My performance in the exams meant I had surpassed the points that I needed, and I wish I could say that I had yearned desperately to transfer the surplus to my friends, but that’s not the system. We are taught to measure ourselves by these three figures, and it’s every man for himself.

The night of the results was one that we had looked forward to for weeks, anticipating a few hours of complete abandon and debauchery in the solitary nightclub that my small town has to offer. IDs were procured and heels were donned, but no amount of alcohol could disguise the stiff tension that now pervaded my demographic.

In the weeks that followed, awkwardness fizzled into bitterness and deepened into what threatened to be an impassable gulf: those who had been successful found their pleasure marred by sympathy for less fortunate friends, as the latter faced a choice between several undesirable options while struggling to keep up a façade of support and encouragement for their college-bound classmates.

The long and short of it is, whatever your own personal outcome, the time between the 15th of August and the various freshers’ weeks will be fraught with tension and confusion, with excitement only in shot-sized measures. But a month later, you won’t know yourself – I speak only from my own experience, but having conversed with people who did repeat I understand that that, too, gets easier. While some bonds won’t stand the test of distance and circumstance, new ones will form – but meanwhile the Leaving Cert will threaten to hang over you like an unwelcome wasp: of no particular significance, but still possessing the infuriating ability to sting you repetitively.

Even now, as I face into my second year as a Trinity student, I experience the odd, ridiculous moment of regret that I didn’t get that Irish paper re-checked – surely I could have bumped my points up that small percentage higher, so that I could – what, exactly? – feel that little bit more deserving of my place within these sanctified halls? No. After the first semester, even those of you that felt so humbled and indebted upon receiving that long-awaited CAO offer will have ceased to think of college itself as much more than simply the newest stage of your life. Infinitely better than the last, no doubt, but still just that – life.

Whatever the outcome, the day of the Leaving Cert results will do everything in its power to become the most important day of your youthful existence, but will succeed only if you allow it to. My advice? Don’t.

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