Published on 12, July, 2020
Just curious about people who slipped through the net, so to speak. How did you cope with school? I developed quite good ways of hiding how much i struggled. It helped that i was in most of the bottom sets, as no one really cared back then. I was in the top set for biology, i excelled in that area. Nothing else part from sport. I hated going in every day, i was like a zombie....i literally cant remember my last year in school. Ive blanked it out completely.
Academically, very, very well. I got 10A*s at GCSE and 4A*s at A-level.
Everything else, really quite badly.
Primary school was one of those things where you don't realise quite how bad it is until after it is over. I had no friends for most of my time there, the friends I did make left the school to go to one with more support. I was bullied horribly for 4 years. I don't think my teachers really knew what to do with me. I could do the work, but I couldn't do the people. A lot of my school reports refer to my need to 'try harder to socialise' and 'make more friends'. The teachers main way of encouraging this was confiscating books at things like break time if they felt I should be socialising which went predictably awful. I wasn't incredibly disruptive or naughty but I would often misunderstand instructions, transitions between activities, and couldn't at all and still struggle with knowing what information was 'not to be repeated' when teachers and adults discussed stuff in front of me. Which they kept doing. While yelling at me for having told someone or parroted what they said. I spent a lot of time very confused in primary school.
Secondary school was also kind of poor but for the first time I met people more like me and had a safe space to hide in during breaks and lunches. Also these teachers cared far less about what I was doing as long as I got good grades. By year 10 I was using earphones or headphones near constantly without being challenged by anyone other than SLTs that never interacted with me and by year 11 every teacher assumed I had been given permission. I struggled to do homework outside of school but I had enough spare time in lessons after finishing the work that I got most of it done in school and those that I didn't have time to I was academically capable enough that my teachers didn't have evidence it was affecting my work. I didn't do any English homework for the whole of GCSE despite some being set twice a week. I didn't do any maths homework out of class for year 8 to year 11. My teachers didn't realise or didn't care. During GCSE my teachers had learnt that I also liked to have a physical copy of the work so would let me use a textbook or a copy of the powerpoint on my ipad (very tech based school, everyone had to have Ipads) to follow the lesson.
Sixth form was better as I was only doing subjects that interested me but still failed with the people thing. I would literally sit with clear spaces in every direction and would go weeks without talking to anyone in my class other than my teachers when addressed. I had a few friends in the extra curricular club I would spend my frees and breaks in, but they were all different years. My self teaching also ramped up further. For chemistry, physics and maths I was almost entirely getting to the content before the teacher so had to pay less attention. Further maths was harder but there were also only 4 of us in the class so it wasn't noisy in the same way so headphones were less necessary.
So yeah. Academically great, I came away with great grades. I also came away with a ton of maladaptive coping mechanisms that I'm still seeking treatment for now, and a complete exhaustion at the end of every day which left me unable to do much else until I'd decompressed for a few hours. Leaving school was amazing but work isn't much better in terms of the exhaustion.