Discovering Friends in Portmouth

Dropping out of college at 16 can look like failure from the outside. In my case, it was not rebellion, laziness, or a lack of ambition. It was what happens when a young person runs out of options before they have even had a proper chance to start. That is the part people often miss. When someone leaves education early, the easy story is that they did not try hard enough. They made bad choices. They threw away an opportunity. But in 2007, my life did not feel like a list of c