Once upon a time I loved school. Then, I transitioned to high school and life changed. I might have, maybe, made it through one term before the walls began to close in on me.
Suddenly, I was overcome with debilitating anxiety when it came to school. I started out having days off for headaches and stomach aches, I was being physically effected by my irrational, yet very real, fear of stepping within the school grounds.
The worst thing, other than the fact that I actually wanted to go and simply couldn’t was that I had no idea why. As far as I remember, I wasn’t the victim of bullying. I had a group of friends, a typical bunch of teenage girls – we were close but we had our moments. I was doing well in class. High school life should have been a blast.
Instead, I was crippled. Not knowing then what I do now, I was unaware that my physical illnesses were actually manifestations of what was happening with me mentally. In fact, I didn’t really know I was having any real issue other than being sick for some time. But, once it became obvious that my cycle of illness was in direct correlation with school terms and Monday to Friday I could no longer control myself and the chest crushing, mind numbing terror when I was supposed to be getting ready for school.
The night before, I would have given myself a pep talk, gotten my books ready and told my parents I would, unequivocally, go to school the next morning. I absolutely would. And then, the morning would come and all hell would break loose. Screaming, yelling, crying. Me, my parents, all of us in a situation we had no idea how to handle.
Before it had a name, it had a scathing, heart breaking daily routine of mess and torture. I was torn. So torn. I hated that I could be so calm, so sure that I could do it, that I could get up the next day and walk into school like every other normal person in the world and then as the day began I turned into a monster of epic proportions. Only recently have I been able to differentiate that volatile girl from myself and know that I was not a bad teenager. Had I gone through life without this, I probably would have been one of those annoyingly perfect teens. You know the ones.
I wanted to be normal, back with my friends, doing teenage things more than anything. Instead, I left that school. Maybe telling one of those friends, I can’t remember. I couldn’t explain. I knew I looked like a brat. People were offering to ‘look after me’ like my parents were to blame for my rebellion. Nobody knew, nobody could understand and it all simply looked behavioral.
I went to live with my grandparents. I attended the school I had gone to in Kindy. I went to a psychologist twice a week. Eventually, I had a reason. I had a name for the monster plaguing me. School Phobia. To me, it didn’t sound real. Until that moment, the only phobia I knew of was arachnophobia and until then I knew nothing of exactly what ‘phobia’ meant.
I spent more of my high school career out of class than in. Even in that little school, surrounded by people I’d known forever, I felt like everything was too close. I felt the walls. I felt like someone else was breathing my air. Yet, I still had no idea why.
I found a way to work through it and return to my original high school. All my old friends hated me because I’d left, because of the rumours about why (my favourite being that my youngest brother was actually my son and I’d left to have him and then given him to my mum) or just because they didn’t understand or know who I was anymore. I didn’t hold it against them, though it made life that much harder to face every day. Somehow, I did. I managed a year and a bit of my senior years before finishing up via distance. I was proud that I had made that progress and vowed to help others who might feel this same horrible, life altering anxiety.
But then I didn’t.
I don’t even want to think about how many years it’s been since I left school (hello old age) and I certainly don’t want to think about all the time I’ve spent not helping a single solitary soul. A simple search of this blog, which depicts pretty much every thing, turned up one result for ‘school phobia’ – a post about my wish to unschool my children.
When the topic came up recently, I was surprised. It’s like I’ve completely forgotten my entire teenage schooling life. Almost as if that was not me. I still suffer anxiety, even recently I’ve suffered, but somehow it’s like that screeching, phone destroying (yes, really, I pulled it right off the wall) mad woman was a stranger.
And all of a sudden it became very important to me to share my story.
Writing this has been hard. I didn’t think it would be, but it’s like I am back there. Thankfully, I can take a deep breath and remind myself that my own school journey is behind me. Now, I face the future of my children’s journey with trepidation. Never, ever do I want them to feel the way I did. Ever. Not just the anxiety, but the flow on effect of feeling like a bad person, the sting of disappointing your parents day after day and the learned behaviour of not trusting yourself.
I want to help others who have children suffering, or the children themselves because it’s real but where do I start? I can’t think of a single thing that would have helped back then. I want to say “Talk to them” but, my 13 year old self would have raged and carried on. I know we talked. So much talking and no resolution.
For the record, I have since become enlightened as to a possible trigger for my School Phobia – I developed and got my period early. Like, early. And, as I have mentioned before, I was shocked at the changes – didn’t expect them and on top of that I was the only girl with boobs at that time. My early development has been flagged as a probable cause and I absolutely concur – I was young, unsure and changing well before others. I had no friends experiencing the same things. It might seem like not a lot, but when you’re still in primary school and you’re already pretty self conscious, it can be huge.
Image may be NSFW.
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Linking up with Jess from Diary of a SAHM for IBot
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