The A Side ✔

1- PANIC

Rewind back to 2012, when the London Olympic games had captured an audience of millions worldwide. Where artists such as Olly Murs and Flo Rida were topping charts everywhere and where I like most British teenagers was sitting the first year of my GCSE choices.

GCSEs were hard, they determine your future. It's what employers look at and the most important ones are Maths and English. Without that fixed C grade, you have to keep re-sitting it until you get it. But, GCSEs aren't all bad news. At my old school, there were a wide variety of subject choices on offer including Art and Design, History, Drama etc etc. My parents let me choose whatever options I wanted to do. It was into the November of 2012 that things were quite rocky. There were assessments to determine your current working level and being one of the worst type of learners when it comes to exams, I was never comfortable being in the tense, stressful conditions of an exam room.

In a Maths lesson, we were all warned. All 16 students in the class that I was in at the time about an upcoming assessment to reflect on the topics that we had learnt since the September of 2012. Maths at that time was one of my favourite school subjects, I was into bar charts and anything to do with equations but not anymore. And I will explain why in a later part of this book.

My Maths book was already half full since I was really the only one actually taking time to copy out all of our teacher's notes off of the board for future reference. A mixture of crappy drawn diagrams trying to express a parallelogram caught my eye. Shapes were an utter nightmare and to this day, they still are. But from what I am about to tell you from experience, shapes do play a role in.

The day of this assessment rolled around and we all had to sit on separate desks away from anyone to prevent copying of answers and attempted cheating. My Maths teacher explained the rules of the assessment and the length of time we had to finish it which was one whole lesson. At my old school, lessons lasted approximately 50 minutes and we had 6 lessons in a day. A break between the end of lesson 2 and the start of lesson 3. Lunch between the end of lesson 4 and the start of lesson 5. This was the lesson before lunch.

That November day I can recall was crisp and cold with a touch of frost still visible on the branches outside our classroom window on the ground floor. The only heater in the room was at the back and on this particular day, the caretaker had forgot to switch it out so the room felt like Antarctica. Everyone sat nervously in their seats as the assessment began.

The only noises that you could hear were passing footsteps in the corridor and the shuffling of pens and papers from the students. Any word spoken out loud would result in your test paper being ripped out and the guilty party sent out of the room.

About two-thirds of the way through the assessments, I started to shake. At first, I thought it was just shivering to blame due to the cold room but when I looked down at the side of my right wrist, I looked white as a ghost. My eyebrow started to twitch which became quite irritable and the cheap metallic taste emerged from my mouth. It was literally one of the freakiest things to happen to me. By now, I was way too freaked out to even put my hand up, let alone scream for help. I wasn't sure if I was going to faint or not. My heart was racing incredibly fast, my eyes frantically looked up towards the clock on the side of the wall by the door. I had plenty of time since I was almost done, so why the panic?

By the time that the assessment was over, both the palms of my hands were drenched in sticky sweat even though the skin on my wrists and cheeks were as pale as the colour of snow. As my fellow classmates all joined their friends and went off to have lunch, I hid away indoors and wouldn't eat a mouthful of the packed lunch that my parents had spent time making for me. It wasn't out of disrespect for them, I was still feeling relatively sick at that moment. At home that evening, I remember eating like a pig.

I couldn't quite put my finger on what made me freak out that day. There are several possibilities that could have been the cause. After spending a lot of time beforehand revising things through and getting my parents to help me with anything that I didn't understand, I considered myself quite well prepared for the assessment. The room was one that I was familiar with, the teacher was still the same as normal, I wore my school blazer to keep me warm within the cold classroom. Yet something felt odd.

A few days later, I was sat in my room revising this time for a Chemistry test as part of my Core Science GCSE when the same things happened again. And I wasn't even at school, yet alone wearing school uniform! I started to think that perhaps, anything school related was to blame for these mysterious outbursts.

In the past back in Primary School, I had struggled with shyness but nothing too severe as to the thoughts and feelings that I was experiencing. My family were not the type that served any serious pressure on me. They all wanted me to do well and achieve relatively good grades but as long as I was happy, they were happy too. Being too afraid to ask around my friendship circle, I turned to the internet as my secret weapon, hoping to be somewhat clearer with all of the happenings.

I typed in, "Being Anxious for no reason." Almost straight away, a link came up to a medical site talking about mental health. I clicked on the link and waited, playing things safe since my parents were in the adjoining room and had no idea about what was happening with my internet searches. As a speed reader, I read the article quickly and throughout this article, it referred to having a strong form of Anxiety.

But from doing GCSEs, I knew that research involves looking and reading information from more than one source so I clicked the next link. A quiz about whether or not you have anxiety. I did the quiz, answering all of the 15 or so questions in the best way that I could. My results couldn't have come more of a shock to me. And it was something that was going to change my world forever, both for the better and for the worst:

You have Anxiety