My exam is in 8 days, yet I'm still averaging mock scores in the 1700s. I begun revising a month ago and I revise for 4-5 hours everyday. I'm not sure what to do, anytime I do a mock I get really stressed, start overthinking and disregarding everything I've learnt. My timing is also really poor. I want my score to be at least 500 higher by the exam but I'm not sure if that's realistic anymore.
I'm going in to year 13 in a couple weeks and my whole of my year 12 was set on applying for medicine. However, I've been thinking that I should go to dentistry school instead. I relate to dentistry more because I've had quite a few issues with my teeth in the past and I also like the art aspect that dentistry offers. The problem is that I would have to change multiple things in a short period of time: all the unis I've been looking at, my personal statement and I've done work experience in a hospital, not in a dental clinic. Overall, I'm not sure if this is a good decision but I don't want to enter medical school and regret my decision.
I am black African 17F and I don't want to feel this way anymore. My mental health as a whole is probably fine but I feel as if the longer I continue to live and 'view' life the way I am currently the worse it will get.
I'm going into my second year of A levels and I do chemistry, biology and geography; to make it simple my GCSEs were decent but my maths grade very narrowly missed the requirements needed to study chemistry at the school I really wanted to go to. Chemistry is a must to study medicine... From this moment onwards from GCSE results day, everything just got vastly worse for me, like a series of events that I just never really chose for myself. So the school I wanted to go to was a state school, a very good sixthform college, but instead my parents forced me to go to a private sixthform. I did year 7-11 in a private school and I loved the friends I made there, but I hated the environment as a darkskin black girl. In terms of racism, yes it could have been worse but regardless its damaging as a young person to not be around people that acctually look like you and having to tolerate racist jokes and behaviours or else I would be outcasted. I felt like a coconut. And I hated that and for the entirety of year 11 the only thing that pushed me through was the fact that I could escape the private school environment, so last minute to be thrown back into it I felt like everything around me was crumbling. I begged my parents not to send me there, and I was riduculed and shouted at called 'stupid' and 'ungrateful' when in reality for one of the first times in my life I was just expressing how I felt to them. I am confident that my parents want the best for me and they want to give me the best oppurtunity they can offer me; but as immigrants from africa who were raised in nigeria/ cameroon they don't fully understand the isolation private schools cast upon black kids. Despite this, I truly did feel as if I was being ungrateful, this private school was especially expensive and both my parents, who are doctors, had to work even harder just to send me there.
Maybe it was a suprise to my parents but definitely not for me but I despised that school for so many reasons, but worst of all I was struggling with my mental health because of it and consequently my A-levels took a hit. Just within under the first month of school or so I had my biology teacher, tutor and housemaster all try to convince me to drop biology, which was a subject I do genuinely like. These people didn't know me nor did they know my abilities, they only saw me as someone bound to bring their statistics down for the worse. It was horrible, I couldn't go a single day without crying and it felt as if no one truly understood my pain, but I was just being a ungrateful right? I built up so much resentment towards my parents because of how I suffered for months just because of a decision I begged them not to make. Even right now, as I've nearly come out on the other side of this, I don't know if the resenment and aminosity will ever fully dissapate.
By the end of the year I was predicted A\*A\*B, and hoping to bring up the B in chemistry to an A by doing another mock at the start of year 13. So everything is fine now plus my parents are proud of me, so why aren't I happy? Why do I still feel the same way I did the beginning of year 12, it just manifested itself differently?
Maybe it's an accumulation of repressed negative emotions. At 15 my best friend was a 'druggie' she used ketamine often sometimes at school too and at that age I simply did not know how to support someone in such a situation. She is now clean. Her and our other best friend around the same time used to self harm pretty badly and at one point one them had anorexia. No one knows how these things have affected me, I don't even know myself. I tell myself that I can't use somebody else's pain to explain why I feel so down all the time, but I've started to come to the realisation that maybe its my pain to share too, since they're my closest friends and it hurt to feel so helpless. My parents don't know any of that and acctually neither of my friends know how badly it affected me, perhaps of a result of not knowing how to process and organise my thoughts about it at the time appropriately. That same year, I got high off weed for the first time and the trip was horrible because I kept on having these awful thoughts; it took me nearly a year to realise it wasn't the weed making me feel that way, it was my own mind. However, prior to this epiphany I suffered with derealization and I started to become overly numb to some emotions. The derealization hasn't gone away, I've accepted that maybe it never will but its become better the latter half of year 12.
As I said before, my parents are doctors and they want me to be a doctor too, do I want to become a doctor I dont know, but frankly I don't know many things that I truly want in my life.
My mum plans everything and it feels like she micromanages me, everytime we talk its just about school or my study plan and it drives me insane. Although, I am grateful to have a mum that cares so much about my future, helps me study biology, plans for me etc. I just wish our relationship could have a deeper emotional bond sometimes. For more context, from ages up until 10, I had multiple aupairs (babysitters that would stay in my house to take care of me for around a year each). Sometimes I wonder if this is this reason for our disconnect, but as I mature I realise that one of my flaws is being too secretive and lying about things because I think its easier than saying the truth, even with my bestfriends.
I don't really know what outcome I expect from posting this, but maybe that's my problem: that I don't ever know what I want in my own damn life. I don't even know where to start in order to improve this.
TL;DR I feel like shit all the time and I'm scared that if I don't take the reigns over my own life, I'm going to feel like this for the rest of time. Also maybe I should get a diary lol