In following her dream of studying chemistry, Charlotte Istance-Tamblin sees how to break the toxic patterns in her relationships.
Charlotte Istance-Tamblin, Charley to her friends, is a 2nd year undergrad student at The University of Manchester working towards an MChem. She hopes to develop a deeper understanding of radiochemistry before moving into teaching at the academic level. Outside of university she enjoys roller derby and travelling with her wife where ever they are able to.
This story originally aired on January 25, 2019 in an episode titled “Courage.”
Story Transcript
My story starts I think where everyone’s story starts, when you’re a child. I think I remember being given a chemistry set by my father. I don’t think it would pass the Health and Safety requirements of today because I remember very clearly him helping me to make copper sulfate crystals. I don’t know if there was actually acid in the box that came with it.
He also showed me a Periodic Table. I remember very, very clearly my eyes flitting down to Elements 92 and 94. For those of you who are familiar with the periodic table, I’m just going to leave that one with you.
And I found that inside me there was a bit of a spark. A bit of a fire started to burn for science. But as I went through school, I was unfortunately very easily influenced and I didn’t really put a lot of work in because, of course, it’s not cool to work hard. But also I didn’t want to not work so I managed to find a happy medium of doing as little work as possible.
As I got a bit older, this developed into pure out-and-out laziness. I’m not proud of it but it is what it is. I get to my teenage years and I’m very lazy at this point. I’m not putting much work in. But as I got to my GCSEs, I did study quite hard for them. I could have studied more but… I put some work in.
But three weeks before my exams, my parents split up. My dad was very unhappy living with my mum and he left. Even so, it was just before my exams and I had to get on with it, so I went and did my exams.
And I got a reasonable result, a little bit above average, double B in Science GCSE, so I did something right. But the problem is is that now I had to do my A-levels and I had to do my A-levels without the academic because, slowly but surely, I was learning how to hate him. He wasn’t there and I didn’t want to call him.
So I had my mom. She’s Polish. She didn’t really know much about the English education system and she was no scientist. So I got stuck into three A-Levels: Computing, Chemistry and Physics, and I absolutely failed at Chemistry. In fact, I quit after the first year with the agreement with my tutor that this was most decidedly not the subject for me.
I dragged myself through Physics and I blew all of my exams. In fact, when my results came through, three A-levels, three results, they spelled out a word, E-N-D, ‘end’.
So what’s to do? I went to work and I shut myself into a prison. Not a prison made of concrete and metal and guards. No. It was a prison made of mobile phones, sales targets, conference calls, and altogether hellish things that come with phone-related retail. That became my life.
I wasn’t happy. I filled my life up by spending money I didn’t have and making friends with people who contributed nothing to my life, and dating people who didn’t really care about me. That was my life.
And the fire was really, really going out. There was virtually nothing left inside.
Then when I found out that a girl I had been dating had been cheating on me repeatedly and I had just accepted her meager explanations instead of calling bullshit on it, something happened inside me. I decided I want to go travelling. I had a credit card and a really, really stupid idea.
Armed with a credit card, a passport, and no idea what I was doing, I walked into a travel agent and said, “I’d like a ticket to New York, please.”
No hotel, no nothing. I figured that out by phoning New York, as you do.
I went and it was amazing. It was wonderful. I felt so alive. The brightness of the city, that I was crying my eyes out on top of the Empire State Building looking at this wonderful place. I sat with a storming hangover on Liberty Island and shakily wrote some postcards. I took a selfie of myself with an old film camera. I looked so cross.
The one thing that I remember most about New York City is it stinks. It smells so bad. But to me, that smell was amazing. It was the smell of freedom. Not the American Dream, Star-Spangled-Banner freedom, but a personal freedom. And the fire burnt brightly.
But all too soon the trip was over. I didn’t have any money. This was all on credit card and I couldn’t stay there forever.
So I came home and went back to the old life of selling phones and just existing, and down went the fire.
Then shortly after a trip to Spain to see some family, I met somebody and we started a relationship. In hindsight now this was not a good idea because there were red warning flags all over that from Day 1. She slowly diminished my relationships with my friends and I ended up just staying at home and facilitating her living her life while I just sort of dragged myself along.
I started to get quite bitter because I was surrounded, I was meeting people in my job selling phones who were off travelling the world and studying and all the other great things, and I hated them for it. It was a tangible bitterness that existed inside me. I loathed them. Then when friends of mine would go and do the same thing, I hated them too because I couldn’t do those things.
In a last ditch attempt to try and make something of this life, I applied for a job for promotion. The idea was to get the manager’s job in the town where I lived. They didn’t give me that. They offered me a job in a town 40 miles away. Same job but just miles and miles away.
I was angry because I was really at the bottom of the pile now. And I had a shouting match with the Head of Recruitment for this phone company in a Regional Manager’s Conference in front of everybody. In all fairness, he shouted back as well. It wasn’t just one way. We both argued.
So after a little while, we both cooled down and I went back and spoke to him again. That was when I truly gave up because I just slumped my shoulders and said, “Tell me about this job.” At that moment, I knew there was nothing I could get from this. This was it.
So I went and I found that not only was there no fire but I was surrounded by darkness, a complete, miserable darkness that if I stretched out my hand, I couldn’t see it anymore. And if you’re in that kind of darkness with no reference points, there’s a name for that. You're lost.
If there’s no way you can turn on a light, you need someone to do it for you. That someone was quite unexpected because it took the form of a rather scruffy emo girl who walked into the shop and we talked. She was looking for a job. I needed a member of staff. Myself and my assistant manager interviewed her, and she gave a good interview. Even to this day, she says she blagged it.
Suddenly, I found myself feeling something inside. I wasn’t used to it because, as we spent time together and as our little friendship started to develop, I felt happy. But the happiness was tempered because I couldn’t get out of my prison, and I knew there was no getting out of it.
Time went on and we, our friendship got a little bit closer. I can leave how close it got to your imagination. Then towards the end of a year, I tried to leave the relationship I was in, but I couldn’t. I ended up going back. You hear stories about abused partners going back. And if you’ve never been in that situation, you often think to yourself, “Oh, my goodness, how on earth could you go back?”
I get it now. I can't explain how I get it, but I get it. I understand because I don’t know why I went back, but I did.
Until one night, she found out that me and this girl had been talking. There was no evidence of any kind of relationship beyond friendship but, even so, she got really angry. I went to bed that night afraid. For the first time in my life, I was truly afraid.
So I thought, “I have to escape”. And ‘escape’ is not too strong a word. I have to get out of this.
So there, lying there in the middle of the night, hearing her stomping around the house, I made a plan. The plan was when she dropped me off at the station the next morning and then would go to work, I would get in a taxi and come back to the house because I had some money, which was quite rare at that point. But it was so hard to get back into that taxi. It was so hard to miss the train. It was so hard to get in the cab to go back to the house. And then it was hard to gather my things together. It was hard to call my mom and say, “Please, can you bring the car around? I’ve got to get out of here.”
Somehow, somehow, I managed it. But I was even afraid of taking things that were mine. I left with a minimal amount of stuff. It’s quite a good way of having a clear-out.
So I was out. It took a long time to get over what she did to me, and I’m still getting over it. But that was okay because, now, there was a new life involved. We, me and this woman who is my friend, we started seeing each other properly. We made it official because we were still working together so we had to keep it quiet in work. But we started travelling.
The first trip we took, we went to, we travelled all the way up Poland, sort of half my heritage, and visited Chernobyl as well, which was just amazing. Then the fire was back in my life.
But something was tempering it. Something was stopping it from burning. It was only after we got married and travelled all the way around the world and we’re stopping off in New Zealand and we ticked off so many bucket list entries and had a drink in the Green Dragon in Hobbiton, I got back and I thought, “I know what I have to do.”
So one morning, I woke up and I said to her, I said, “I want to go back to school.”
She said, “Why?’
I said, “I want to study Chemistry.”
She’s, “What for?”
I said, “I’d like to teach it.”
She's, “Well, go do it, then,” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
So I thought, well, okay, fine. I’ll go and do it.
I found an Access course, so I discovered that Access courses exist. I re-sat my Maths GCSE and, very quickly, I thought, “I’m going to get the best I can get, so I’m going to get an A at my maths and I’m going to get 45 out of 45 distinctions at my Access course.”
And I did, and I got it. In doing so, we had to look at universities. It was a visit to Loughborough University, and I said, “Could I study Radiochemistry as part of my masters?”
They said, “No. You’ll need to go to Manchester for that.”
So I text my wife and I said, “They say I’ll need to go to Manchester.”
Four minutes later, a text came back saying, “I’ve booked us on the Open Day.”
So they demanded, of course - it’s Manchester - they demanded the very best grades that I could deliver. And that’s what I gave them. We moved to Manchester and I study Chemistry and I’ve never been happier.
Thank you.