Exam Stress

Stress

I didn’t know if I had the courage to do this. I was shaking. I was nervous. I could feel my hands trembling by my side. I kept telling myself that it’s all psychological but could I really do reverse psychology on myself? My family told me that I would be great but that hasn’t alleviated my fears. As the seconds felt like hours, the fear grew and grew. I could feel my body rejecting this awful feeling but it kept growing and growing until I felt sick to my stomach. I paced up and down, again and again. But, nothing was curing this.

The hour had arrived. It all came down to this moment. I could hear the typical cliché advice from my parents in the back of my mind but it wasn’t helping. As the old, wooden door approached me I was trying to observe the scene but all I could focus on was taking each step cautiously; the growing anxiety silenced the loud muttering around me. I took the deepest breaths possible at this moment but the intoxicating air was causing me to panic more.

As I sat down my hearing came back to normal and I could hear the lady speaking at the front, I tried to listen and understand what she was saying but I was distracted by something very unusual. Perhaps, it was to distract me from what I have been building, creating and preparing for, for the past five years. The moment had finally come and I was staring out of the white, clean window at the low hanging, dark clouds preemptively trying to figure out my way home. I hadn’t even begun and I was already thinking about leaving. I could hear the woman chatting away but I was having my own conversation in my head. My thoughts overpowered the lady muttering to the room. All these thoughts were running through me.

In this short moment, my anxiety had stopped. The constant growth of this internal fear felt like it was locked away. But, it was this growing fear and this growing anxiety which was going to get me through this. I snapped out of gazing out of the window and pulled myself together. I took one last deep, intoxicating breath and lifted my trembling right hand and clenched the equipment out of my deep blazer pocket and before I even wrote my name, the lady at the front bellowed ‘Start!’.