1. Waiting to Fall

I was born on the 23rd of December 2002 to a loving family. I was very quiet, not wanting to annoy people and trying to stay out of trouble. In fact, I didn’t speak till I was 3 years old. When I joined primary school I was probably the shyest in the year and I was always sitting at the back of the classroom, silently. I remember being 5 years old and seeing my teacher pointing her finger at me, telling me to get a paint brush. I didn’t know where this paintbrush was and I was so terrified to ask and to be seen by other students that I just froze and sat still, praying I wouldn’t be told off. When I eventually was told off, I was so mortified and embarrassed, thinking to myself “why didn’t you just ask where the paintbrush was like anyone else would?”

But that’s the strange thing about me, I’m not like anyone else.

I have another memory of that year – getting changed into our school uniform from P.E. I just couldn’t do the buttons up on my school dress, and I remember hiding under the table after everyone else had changed their clothes. ‘Clumsy’, that was my label and my dad would call me ‘dreamboat sally’. I couldn’t do my hair up, tie my laces or do buttons up until I was 9. Then I received the diagnosis of dyspraxia and everything made sense. I got the right support I needed and by the time primary school finished, I was so much more confident in myself that I won student of the year! I was and still am so proud of that moment.

Now, during these years, I had an amazing group of friends, but we weren’t in the “cool group”. You really see the beginnings of the social hierarchy in the late years of primary school. How we are like pack members in a war of who is most liked by good-looking boys, friends and teachers. That’s what I did in primary school – I labeled every group like I was Janis and Damien from Mean Girls. Looking back I guess it was a coping mechanism to deal with not fitting in. So when I joined secondary school, all I wanted was to be popular, accepted and to belong.

I came to the school with the words from my brother “I had an amazing first year” repeating in my head. I told myself that I was going to have the same experience, even when I knew that I didn’t fit in from the get go. I refused any support, not wanting people to know I had dyspraxia, and ignored the fact that I was having increasing trouble coping at school. There were other behaviour patterns that went unaddressed – I regularly lost most of my possessions at school, I couldn’t organise myself no matter how many times I was told off, I would cross the road without checking for cars and I began to struggle being with more than one person at a time. I wondered why I had so much difficulty with every-day tasks that others seemed to take in their stride. Years later, in fact, only a few months ago, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Finally, I know it’s not my fault.

I wasted the first few years of secondary school desperately trying to be popular, to the extent that I dropped all my friends from primary school to become someone that I was not. I felt like bacteria, moving from one host to the other, until I realised my efforts were to no avail. At the age of 12 I spent the whole summer in bed, a massive sign of what was to follow.

At this point in my life I was balancing on the top of a slippery slope; my parents often argued and frustrations were sometimes let out on my brother and me leaving us in a vulnerable position. We began to plead that they would split up. My self loathing increased and by the time I was 13 years old, it was obvious to me that my parents had no awareness of how I was feeling. Frustrations were let loose and spilled over on us all. One day I felt so hated and so desperate that I could see no point in carrying on life with such a huge cloud looming over me. I went downstairs, got a packet of paracetamols, went to the bathroom and almost took them with the intent of ending it all. The ‘almost’ was stopped in its tracks by my brother finding me seconds before – he had seen me with the pills and followed me upstairs.

The next day we acted like nothing had ever happened.