I wanted to talk about academic anxiety. Of course, my anxiety is kinda generalized, but I have a very specific type of anxiety related to academic environments.
Like, I always hated school, all of my 11 years of obligatory education were absolute hell, but things went downhill in college. I started to fail in college after a first year of doing very well, but then I started failing, and spiraling down, and over time the fear of failing made me fail, and then fail even harder. And my mom did it a lot worse.
I won’t tell everything my mom did because I don’t want to write a bible, but because I was failing I was screamed almost daily, verbally abused almost daily, guilt-tripped, and told that I would never accomplish anything in life. Some days my mom would scream at me for hours with no end.
I stopped telling my mom about my grades, and then went out of her way to get them anyway, because she has a friend who was a professor at the university I was at and he told him my grades (not even a professor of my degree).
I didn’t want to continue because I failed second year and couldn’t bear the shame of coming back after failing. I had fought with my mom a lot about it, and then, she went and sign me up to redo the year behind my back, so I had no option but to do the year again, and I did even worst, because I couldn’t focus on anything, I was only thinking about ending myself in class, and then started skipping classes, and even exams. I skipped the most important exams of the year because I was doing so terribly at them.
At some moment in this year, I suggested my mom to sign me up to an online university, and she exploded at me, we had the biggest ugliest fight we ever had. Of course she don’t remember any of it, conveniently.
And I failed again, the university don’t allow people who fail the same year twice in a row to sign up again, so I just dropped out and my mom could do nothing about it.
In the upcoming years I tried changing careers and universities, and my mom never liked any of them, because they were “lesser” careers and universities. But always, when the first exam came up, I just froze and failed, and then stopped going to university altogether. It happened at least 3 times. The last one was computer science at an online university, I thought would be easy since I like computers a lot and it was an online university, but it happened again, and I’m frustrated that for the online students they just gives us PDFs and videos while the ones that live in the city the university is located, they can go there and actually talk to professors and have in person studying, so I felt at a disadvantage.
My mom will always say I’m a failure because I didn’t finish law school, and I don’t think I can go back to an university because of this terrible anxiety. I can’t even come into a classroom anymore because I have to deal with the anxiety.
The thing is, I love learning, I learn a lot everyday and I love reading a lot. But being at classroom is just terrible for me and I can’t go beyond the easiest first exams.
Thank you, I’m going through a lot rn, but I wanna kinda restart my life with my partner.
IDK if I wanna go back to university, I kinda wish I could but I still fear failing again. I’m 26 and I feel like the older I get the less likely it will be.
I have a lot to work on. I suspect I have ADHD but only been diagnosed with autism and anxiety.
And yes I plan a lot, I plan too much. Rarely planning works but I still overplan.
Thanks for your message. I appreciate it.
Sounds like you’ve got the right idea. I wouldn’t worry about the age thing, I went back to school when I was 29 after shelving it for 5 years, and there were plenty of students I met that were older than me. In a lot of ways the time you’ll have spent learning to work with yourself will give you an edge over the younger students.