School avoidance?
Things are hard. I’m 17 and going into my second last year of school in September. Where I live this is a really important year, because it’s bunched in with next year and our results will determine what university we’ll get to go to. Everybody else around me seems to have such an easy time socially, but ever since school ended in early June, I‘ve attended only 3 days since Christmas (6 full months of absence…)
My attendance has always been spotty. I’ve always had a tendency to get anxious to the point it would make me sick (stomach aches & nausea, lightheadedness, there was more than one day that the stress caused a nosebleed that resulted in my uniform being ruined), or burst into tears on the way to school and have to be driven home again. A mix of bad genes and extreme stress has caused me to suffer from some pretty severe migraines very regularly, which is probably my greatest contributor to missed school.
It’s very annoying! I‘m so annoyed at myself that I mask my AvPD so well. I act so normal and it means that everyone assumes the worst of me when I skip school, when I do bad things. I’m lucky enough to have a childhood friend who seems to care about me, but I’ve pretty much shut her out of my life since Christmas, and she’s branched out as a result and the one or two times I’ve seen her she’s been colder and less interested in me. Nobody suspects that there’s anything wrong with me on the outside. I’m just “shy”, “quiet”, or “uninterested”. But I am interested, I just feel like a sore on people’s eyes, or that one person in the group who nobody invited and nobody wants around, so I distance myself. That friend I mentioned earlier is some super genius with perfect attendance who is invited to an exclusive school awards ceremony every year for her behaviour. I’ve been called the stupid one since we were young, the one who can’t do anything by herself, who had to be taken out of regular language and maths classes to go to those special classes for students with learning disabilities (which I do not have), or regarded by teachers like I’m some delinquent who skips school for no reason and can never keep up with the work.
There are some girls at school who really must hate me. Friends of my only friend who seem to jump at any opportunity to exclude me. In my desperate attempt to make new friends I fuck it up by sharing nothing, because I’m too afraid if I do that they’ll use it as leverage to make fun of me with. I’m all take, take, take. I’m not good enough for anybody and they deserve better than me, so I refused to go to school. School is just a constant cycle of humiliation. Going outside is just spent fighting back pointless tears and bathing in my own inferiority. I can’t cope with leaving the house, let alone going to school every day. I‘m afraid that I won’t be able to bring myself to go back in September at all. I’ve dug myself a hole far too deep.
I don’t know if I’m even going be able to get a full education at this rate. If I can’t do what I want to do with the rest of my life, what’s even the point? How do you even get out of this situation? Going back to school is the obvious solution, but it feels really unattainable for me. I knew this would happen back at Christmas but I never stopped myself. What if I’m just lazy and that’s why I won’t go back? Did anyone else do this? What happened???