I’m sorry, I tend to ramble, plus I’ve never used reddit before, but please hear me out on this first. I am a seventeen-year-old student in my final year at a small all-girls public school, and I’ve been miserable since the day I started. I’ve always struggled with focusing and listening, and however much I stared directly at a teacher and listened word-for-word, I could never make sense of what they were saying. Though I did pretty well in school, I’ve been going downhill since the previous year. I used to enjoy a variety of subjects, but I’ve found that starting a couple of years ago, my passion to succeed in everything has shrivelled and dried up.
Since then, I’ve been rejected from taking four separate subjects that I had applied to do (two of them for being told that “it was correspondence, so I wouldn’t like it”), and I’m already hating three subjects I currently take (two of them I’ve loved since I’ve started high school) and I’m so miserable that I don’t have the energy for anything I used to find enjoyable. My first week back this year, I sat outside a teacher’s office for a week and a half because I was struggling with two subjects already. I’m drained, have been described as “depressed” by my peers, and I feel I’ve become a burden, and I even cried in front of my parents for the first time in years.
It’s been so exhausting for me and my family that even both my parents began to support me in dropping out to go and study at a Polytechnic (before this, my mother exclaimed in a horrified manner that I wasn’t allowed to drop out when I mentioned not wanting to be at school anymore just last year). For the past few months, I’ve taken an interest in the idea of welding, even though the closest I’ve come to it is melting plastic spoons down to create flowers. I’ve always been an artsy kid and into creating things, so it kind of feels right up my alley. The only thing is, I’m terrified that I will end up hating it and regretting ever leaving school. Plus, I do school activities (such as choir, Jazz band, rock band, to which some of them lead to bigger competitions), and I would be leaving my twin and only friend left (all of my other friends left to go to the Polytechnic, though I’m not as close with them).
I need some help right now, seeing that the people around who want to help apparently can’t. I even had a chat with a teacher from our school next door who offered to figure out a timetable for me so that I could take welding classes (they have them there), but the teachers from my school outright told me no because they are on a six-day timetable and we are on a five-day timetable (even though a person from the other school comes over to ours to take dance). I hate taking risks, but I also hate being miserable and doing poorly in subjects as a chronic perfectionist. What the hell do I do?? I’m seriously at my limit right now.