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Still processing school after leaving for good

rory.doctor07

I finished sixth form nearly 2 months ago. I thought I’d feel completely free from that moment on, but those last 2 years have left me feeling terrified whenever I think about it. The amplified stress due to an intense fear of failure made worse by being autistic which people could hardly understand and apparently pastoral support had never seen anything like, the social anxiety, the times I had to escape class so they didn’t all see me being a crying mess, the self-consciousness in class for hours a day, trying to balance work with self-care (taking myself out of the situations), losing grip of myself in the middle of the day, crying every morning as soon as I wake up… you know, just the relentless sense of doom that comes with being autistic in school.

I thought by now that I’d look back and laugh, when really the thought of it makes me feel like I’m back there and it’s terrifying. I wish I could forget it all because it was genuinely the most distressing time of my life so far (thank god I had some friends to offer some relief). I’d be so much better if it was all gone from memory, and I guess “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a huge lie, because it’s just left me anxious and angry that I had to go through it. Even though my grades have never been too bad, I think I should have dropped out for my mental health a while back but here we are now. 

So, like, how long does it take to get over that nightmare? How has everyone else dealt with it??

Parents

  • School is something I still struggle with, it put me off of education for years, I believed myself useless and I stil hear remarks from teachers in my head at times.

    I did get past it, finding that going to college and then uni were so totally different, I think school puts more people off education than it encourages.

    If I have to go into a school I still feel sick, the smell of the places, the only other place I feel like this is a swimming pool.

    I took me a while to take my power back with regards to education and learning, now I enjoy learning, but go back to school, I'd rather stick wasps up my bum!

  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    TheCatWoman said:
    I took me a while to take my power back with regards to education and learning, now I enjoy learning, but go back to school, I'd rather stick wasps up my bum!

    I scraped through my degree with undiagnosed ADHD kicking in hard in the last couple of years. My dreams of being Dr. X died in those years and I never went back to formal education. Sitting in front of a book on a topic I am not 100% interested in is something I think of as a kind of trauma. 30 years after graduating and I still shudder at the thought.

    OTOH, if I don't learn something new every day, I feel a little dead inside. Yesterday, it was Bayesian statistics, today it was refresher course on how stupid Homeopathy is, tomorrow?—who knows.

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  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    TheCatWoman said:
    I took me a while to take my power back with regards to education and learning, now I enjoy learning, but go back to school, I'd rather stick wasps up my bum!

    I scraped through my degree with undiagnosed ADHD kicking in hard in the last couple of years. My dreams of being Dr. X died in those years and I never went back to formal education. Sitting in front of a book on a topic I am not 100% interested in is something I think of as a kind of trauma. 30 years after graduating and I still shudder at the thought.

    OTOH, if I don't learn something new every day, I feel a little dead inside. Yesterday, it was Bayesian statistics, today it was refresher course on how stupid Homeopathy is, tomorrow?—who knows.

Children
  • in reply to TheCatWoman

    INFODUMP ALERT!!!

    Studies have been done on the placebo effect and some have had almost amusing results. Generally, if you give a bunch of people each a pill and say, "This will help," then a significant number of people will find it does help. It doesn't matter what's in the pill. This works particularly well for IBS, for some reason. So, another study decided to tell the IBS sufferers that the pill was a placebo, "Here, take this pill. There's nothing in it. It shouldn't help," and ... it helped surprisingly well. People were asking for more placebo pills, as their IBS got worse when they stopped taking them, even when they knew there was nothing in them. Why was this? Nobody has any idea. Maybe something to do with the brain-gut link?

    The trouble with giving homeopathic remedies to animals is that the placebo effect works on the owner. The owner believes the animal to be improving, but the animal is not, so its suffering is extended unnecessarily.

    BTW, homeopathic pills are essentially little balls of lactose. There is nothing else in them. There is HUGE money in pushing those overpriced sugar pills, though.

  • in reply to Damojo

    Uni was where I was first diagnosed with learning difficulties and given help., so my experience was very different to yours.

    I'd have to disagree with you on homeopathy though, I know it makes no sense, but I've seen it work to many times on animals to think there's nothing in it. I had a treatment as somebodies guineapig, It didn't work in the way I expected, but I can't say it was a bad thing, I totally went off meat and fish and stopped eating them, I knew my body didn't get on with them, but I had sort of caved into peer pressure and started eating them again after many year of being vegetarian. I get on much better as a vegetarian than as a meat eater, very little colic, IBS and I feel so much better and sort of unclogged. I think it also helped me get out of a bad relationship. as all of this happened with a few weeks of taking it.

    I've no idea what statistics are about, I just know I don't understand them very well.