The idea of who you are may come as second nature to some people. If someone were to ask them, 'Who are you?' they would be able to answer easily. They wouldn't hesitate or question who and what they are. They would simply know.

I do not have that luxury. When I think about who I am I have no idea. I know that I think (although according to so philosophers I do not know even that), I know that I have emotions, I know that I am lots of things. I am a human being, a sister, a daughter, sometimes a friend, but if you asked me to really define myself I struggle. I've always described and thought of myself in relation to others. I was the smart one or the musical one or the one with blue hair. However, over the past few months, I have lost these things.

Just over four years ago I moved to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the east coast of England. It was a small school and an even smaller sixth form. That was good for me at the time, in part, because I moved due to depression and bad experiences at past schools in the north that were bigger. Although the kids in the school were better, some of the staff weren't, but that's a different blog post. Because the sixth form college was so small it wasn't that difficult to be at the top. (I say this lightly as I worked extremely hard for my grades, to the point where I'm still suffering from RSI in my hand from writing too much during revision for exams). Despite many setbacks during my exams I managed to get the highest grades (along with another girl) in my college. So I could still define myself as 'the smart one'.

However, when I got to university I very quickly became aware that I was very much not the 'smart one'. Maybe one of the smart ones, but at a redbrick university, pretty much everybody had similar intelligence. So that part of my definition of myself was out of the window. To add insult to this injury, it wasn't even my first choice university.

Due to the aforementioned RSI hasn't been able to play guitar or piano for the past few months either, and with freshers flu hitting hard, I can also no longer call myself the musical one. Even when I was playing music I was never a fantastic musician, I'm mediocre at best on both piano and guitar, and while my voice is getting stronger, that too is middle of the road. My strength lay with my songwriting, but as I get older and things keeping happening and needing to be done, I'm losing touch with writing. So that definition is also no use.

I also became tired of my blue hair and so bleached the living daylights out of it. I tend to like to keep changing my hair; chopping it off at will is a very bad habit as I'm sure the cleaners at my college would agree. (One lunchtime I was very, very bored and thought that using the blunt scissors left in the classroom to cut my hair without a mirror would be a fun thing to do).

Ironically, as someone on the autism spectrum, I also have no particular interest in anything right now. I'm a fan of music but there are always more fanatical fans. I used to love reading but English Literature A Level drew the life and soul out of reading for pleasure. I used to be good at sport, but depression got in the way and I struggle to run for more than twenty minutes. I feel like I have no defining aspect of myself.

I wonder if this is a normal thing to feel. If every eighteen-year-old feels the same way when the false reality of school and sixth form life fades away to the reality of having years and years stretching ahead of you with no idea how to fill the day. Or maybe this is a unique experience only felt by those who have had depression for their formative teenage years, rendering them unable to tell the difference between normal sadness and genuine depression as they have never been able to experience the former.