The day I got off the bus

Cures you whisper
make no sense
Slip gently into
mental illness

The Beat, Mirror in the bathroom

One morning, bag of unstarted homework in hand, I got off the school bus at Wymondham and sneaked down an alleyway. I squatted against the wall, bottom nearly touching the ground, hands clasped around my knees. And stayed there.

Could I have stayed in that uncomfortable position for long? Surely I must have walked around town or browsed a shop or two? I don’t know. All I remember, on that most terrible of days, is the alley, the wall, my feet, the cold.

At home my parents wanted explanations for my truancy. At school, teachers wanted their assignments, I suppose stopping off midway between them was a compromise. Why don’t I just do the damn work? I wondered then, and for many years after. But I’d confused symptoms with causes. I wasn’t messed up because I wasn’t doing my homework. I was messed up, so I couldn’t do it.

“Nervous breakdown”, so Wikipedia tells us, has no medical meaning. So let’s interpret my experience that day as a mixture of depression, anxiety, severe stress and panic attack. It was awful.

I had moved schools. I had loved my middle school, a beautiful, bright, enlightened place. My new secondary school, a grammar school with a nationwide reputation, was a dismal, ugly institution of spiteful conformity. I was used to being encouraged (I suppose you might say nurtured), but in that place, expectations were everything. Education was imbibed as a tasteless soup, with the threat of retribution if you didn’t down your portion. But I respected individuals, not authority, and had no desire to learn what didn’t inspire me.

Shocked and overwhelmed, I started feigning physical illness. When that strategy started to fail, all that was left was to skip school.

Eventually I went home and faced the music. My parents and teachers were more puzzled than angry. But I couldn’t explain what I didn’t understand myself. My form teacher kept tabs on me for a while. I felt stupid. I wondered if I would end up “going mental“.

But I had learned some lessons, even if they were the wrong ones. Education was something to be survived, not enjoyed. I would do enough to avoid punishment – which for me, was not much at all – but no more. Within a year, to my glee, my report read “he obtains high grades with a minimum of effort and sometimes shows a disturbing complacency“. I even made a cameo appearance on a friend’s report – “associates with the wrong people…”

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t an out-and-out rebel: I’d learned enough to realise my mental health was at stake down that road. I was surly and sarcastic and renowned for my bone idleness. But I was just horrifically bored.

You internalise these lessons. When my Maths teacher said I lacked the ability to apply myself like my oh-so-perfect brother, I believed him. When my Science teacher mused that maybe science wasn’t “your thing, I figured he was right. When my French teacher – referring me to the Head of Department for embellishing a particularly dull picture essay with a food poisoning scene – said I was immature and flippant, I concurred.

So in that dire miseducation, I embarked on the journey that led, nine years later, to dropping out of University.

My daughter started at school in September. Her teacher, a clever and remarkable woman, wonders if she may be classified as gifted. I should be – am – proud. But I worry. Sending her to school has brought back a wave of memories, and not many are pleasant. I hope education has changed.

I learned to be a failure at school. I don’t want her to learn that.

(For my English teacher, who was entirely blameless)

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