Personal Narrative: My Experience With School

My experience with school has always been bumpy. In elementary school, I often had stomach aches that sent me home, sometimes weekly. I would very slowly walk the long hallway to the main office, and the mean woman who worked at the front desk would look at me, asking a short, “what?”
Then I would stammer through a sentence of, “I don’t feel good…” After this, I would move behind the desks to the nurse’s office and lay there on the bed for awhile, until I called home and my parents.
They usually either said tenderly “oh honey, come on home,” or said very firmly, “you need to stay in school today.” In fifth grade, while playing in the living room with some band like the Pixies playing from my mom’s computer, I asked her, “I want to be homeschooled!” Of course, my mom explained to me why this was both unrealistic, and also very hard. At that age, I had to be able to be around other kids every day, and if I was homeschooled, how could I do that? Being 10 years old, I argued with her logic anyway. Fifth grade was a hard year, I suffered a lot from anxiety and “bouts of sadness” which we later learned to be depression. Sometimes, I would just shut down when too overwhelmed and my eyes would glaze over. I’d just go silent. Later on we also learned I have selective mutism, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, I

Sixth grade was a hard transition, and one of the hardest years of my life. Another one of the hardest years of my life was eighth grade. Some of my friendships deeply suffered, and the person I was in a relationship at the time was suffering through things a 14 year old should never go through. The inner turmoil of my broken middle school relationships deeply affected my anxiety and depression, which in turn affected my school work and life. Needless to say, the only person I keep in contact with from my middle school years is the person who suffered through it with me. He’s now my closest