The testimony of Thelma, an 18-year-old high school student from Bordeaux who has suffered from anxiety disorders since she was 14, is precious. In her own words, she describes the triggers of her discomfort, but also her path to overcome it.
” Yesterday again. I had this dream of reproducing the parental pattern well by having my baccalaureate and doing long studies. Unfortunately we live in the XXIcentury, filled with reforms, global problems. Issues that affect all generations, including the youngest who understand everything and are impacted. My generation has the feeling of not being consulted, that we are not asked for our opinion, and even if we give it, of not being listened to because these problems are “adult” problems.
I arrived in second at high school, in Bordeaux, while in third, my teachers told me that it would go wrong for me. As a result, I felt the pressure from the start of the school year, this competition which is beginning. I quickly developed eating disorders. At that time, my mother’s burnout created a big change in my daily life at home and at school. So I consulted a psychiatrist, I took the time to recreate a relationship with food and I let loose to calculate what I could eat or not, my weight, what I looked like…
It took me a while, then I lived my first year better, between the summer and the confinements, which produced in me like a forced breath out of high school. A cocoon. But then how do you pick up the pace again? My first week of senior year was the trigger. We make you understand that you will have to stand out, have good grades throughout the year if you want to get your baccalaureate and rank in the course. It was that week that I had my first panic attack. I thought I was suffocating without being able to breathe, without understanding why this was happening to me, why I was crying so much. I completely panicked and it was the school nurse who explained to me: “Panic attack”.
The following weeks, the atmosphere at home was tense because no one understood that I no longer wanted to go to school, that I could no longer. I woke up every morning crying without being able to breathe. Sometimes I vomited on the way to high school or felt faint. I have always liked school, I am very sociable by nature. Me, so talkative, impossible to say a word. I didn’t want to go out, talk anymore, stay home in my room and that’s it.
I saw many shrinks, including one who offered me psychiatric hospitalization. But I knew very well that if I held on, it was because I was at home in my room with my parents, my boyfriend, my cat and a few friends who understood what was going on. Many people have said or thought that I was lazy, an out-of-school “unemployed”. But so few tried to understand, even I didn’t understand and I blamed myself before accepting that no, I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t zero, stop blaming myself.
Leaving my house in the morning, revising, concentrating, managing my emotions, without them overflowing in all directions. Impossible. I was constantly afraid of what was happening to me and what I thought I would become. Who was this other person, why had I lost this little girl that according to my parents nothing could stop? Fear of growing up, of becoming an adult, of losing my loved ones, of having to manage a world left to us in a pitiful state, because of decisions made by people who will be dead in thirty years. A feeling of injustice and fear mixed together.
But time is everything. As well as working with a shrink who finally suited me. So I took the time and tried to give myself the tools to react to my own feelings. The people around me over the course of discussions have learned to react too, not to rush me, to give me time to get better and also to understand that no, progress is not constant, you can’t get better now. ‘a blow. I am still learning now to manage all these symptoms, not to blame myself anymore. I still have trouble going to high school but I passed my specialty tests and I finally see the end of it. Because after the storm there is always good weather, and the storm makes you stronger.
There are so many things I would like to express without having the words. The limits of language are a burden, especially when to name what is happening to you there is only one expression: “School phobia”, when in fact I like school. I realize that people fought for me to have this chance to be educated as a young girl, which is not the case in all countries. But how to be well in your head after 2020, when all young people are drooling over it, are lost, no longer necessarily have the passions that their parents had and when they are asked to choose a future when they are 15 years ? How do you continue to love school when you go from kindergarten and elementary school – places of sociability, fun and intellectual awakening – to middle school and high school where you can’t talk or you’ll be punished, where you have to fight to succeed when you’re not even an adult? Why is nobody talking about it? Why in high school aren’t we told to do what we can? And put in place interventions for people who have been through the same as me to give hope and guidance? I needed it so much. »