Hi....
Ive been struggling in life mostly with school and more so starting in maybe some classes in grad 10 but mostly in grad 11. I started to get more anxious, scared and nervous about going to school and being in big groups of people. As time went on i started to preform worst in class during test and exams. And it came to a point where i would get a mental break down every 2 to 3 months. In my second year of university i completely shut down the day before a biology lab mid term. I couldn't function i would just cry and couldn't stop. I would get so mad at myself for not being able to focus and remember the scientific names or the functions of organisms that we were studying. After that i had to fight my parents to be able to go see a therapist as they somewhat made it seems that they were against it and said that im just stressing myself out and that i dont need it.
When I went to the therapist ( it was throw university), we mostly touched on the topic of pressure that i got from my parents in regards to my schooling and my grads. They had suggested to remove that part of the equation to see if it made a difference. So I stoped telling my parents my grads or anything to do with school for about a month but it didn't seem to help. I didn't mention anything after that to the therapist as I did not get the point of doing so. The therapist did though make it so I would be aloud to write my exams in a separate room and that I could get up to 150% of the allowed time to write my exams and test. That seemed to help me a lot more with my performance in my exams. From then on, I would do that for my exams for about a year and a half. During the first semester of my third year, I was taking five classes and four labs which is a lot. I remember having eight or nine exams in the span of 4 weeks. For one of my exam, I got below 50 % and so the professor asked to have a meeting with me to talk about the exam and what happened. When I had the meeting with them I was so nervous and scared. While we were talking they had asked if I ever did an exam orally, and I said no. They mentioned that because they notices as we went through the information of the exam that I knew the information I was just not able to put it in text properly or to explain the information properly in text. We then proceeded in having a test run of an exam done orally and the difference was huge, I went from having 45% to having 85%. After that, with this professor I always did my exams orally.
The person in-charge or the accommodation of the university asked for a meeting after the professor talk to then about it. Then then suggested for me to get a pyscho-educationale test done. Which means that a psychologist would test me with a whole bunch of different scales and test to see if I presented any learning disabilities. It was one of the most nerve raking thing I had to do up to now. So when the test results came back I didn't have any major learning disability that people normally think of. What that test suggested was that it I am in a position were I would need to use my working memory a lot it dosent fonction at full capacity and to add to that the speed at which I process information is a little slower than the average. Meaning when I notice that one of them is slow then I get more stressed as I know something is not right and so the other one get worst and it just plays off of each other like that. They did not test me for anxiety, depression or any other mental mood disorder, thought they had suggested that stress could be a factor but they couldn't be sure of it without being tested for it specifically. And that when I get stressed I also seems to get overwhelmed at the same time with could cause the whole thing to get worst.
Where I am now with the diagnostic, I toke me awhile for it to sink in and I still don't think it has fully yet. I feel as if the accommodation that they have suggested for me to use, are not meant for me. I feel like they don't apply to me, but deep down I know that they are and if a use them the are going to help me . I just have to accept that fact and take the first step in using them. It makes me feel like an imposter like I don't belong, like I am taking advantage of the ressources when I don't need them, like I should be able to do everything like "normal" and "average" people would.
Sorry for the rambling
