Being at a mainstream school with cerebral palsy was a very challenging experience for so many reasons, one of them being the fact that I am very easily fatigued as a result of my disability. Growing up, I never really experienced fatigue and I was always a very energetic child but when I hit the age of around fourteen or fifteen, things changed. I suddenly felt this constant exhaustion and slowly became unable to keep up with the workload of my subjects at school.
This was when my family first suggested that I go on to a part-time timetable. My school weren’t used to having a student with my calibre of disability so this was a new thing for them but eventually they supported this idea of lightning my workload. Even in the first few months of this timetable I felt an immense increase in my energy, I was able to put so much more focus into the subjects I was studying and I felt like I was able to really excel in my classes. In the first couple of years of this, I would spend these rest periods with an assistant and just have a cup of tea, have a chat or catch up with homework. You might be thinking “you’re not at school to be sitting drinking tea” in fact this is the exact response my older sister would give me when I talked about my day, but I would argue that this time during my days were the only times I was truly able to relax. Being away from all the other students took the weight of being perceived off my shoulders and distracted me from the loneliness that I was often experiencing. I also had very close relationships with the assistants at school so having that time to chat with them and offload was really beneficial for my mental health.
There was always that voice in the back of my mind though, comparing myself to everyone else and knowing that they would all leave with more qualifications than me. It’s hard not to be constantly thinking “if I just tried harder” or “if I just pushed through I could’ve been on a full-time timetable”. I think many disabled people can say that they feel this desperation to keep up with their peers and to be just as productive regardless of how unattainable this is. Prioritising mental health can be difficult for anyone even without the disability factor so even though I knew I had to be on a part-time timetable for my health, I would still feel like I wasn’t as good a student as others. I put a lot of academic pressure on myself, my parents were never too focused on my grades but from a personal angle I definitely felt like I had to do well at school to “prove” to people that I was smart. This really upsets me looking back because it was all just in my mind, nobody else was judging me based on my intelligence and in fact, my assistants would always praise me for my grades even when they weren’t as good as I wanted them to be in attempt to lessen my desperation for perfect grades. I also pressured myself to do well because I wanted teachers approvals, sometimes loneliness warps your perception of others around you and I think deep down I thought that if I wasn’t much noticed by pupils that I had to be noticed by staff and I had to do that by continually getting good grades. Even in my last year of school when I was aware of this bad habit of equating my grades to my value, I couldn’t stop.
In the last year of school, I only sat two subjects. Most days I’d be in for three or four hours at most and while I was sitting Advanced Higher English which had a mammoth workload and I would never have been able to complete if I’d sat any more subjects than two, I still felt like I wasn’t trying hard enough or being as productive as everyone else. In saying that, I was pretty consistently top of the class in English which I’d never been in many other classes. My craving for academic validation was fulfilled. That aforementioned need for people to think that I was smart had finally happened however, it didn’t really change my life in the way I’d hoped. I still felt lonely, I still felt like because I was on a part time timetable that I wasn’t “productive” enough.
I’ve since learned that productivity doesn’t look the same for everyone. For some people, they’ll sit five highers and ace them all in one year but for others they will only sit two highers, get decent grades but have expended the same – if not more – energy. Also seeing that I still got three offers from universities when I was concerned that I might not receive any because I had less qualifications than others proved to me that I didn’t have to sacrifice my energy and happiness to get where I wanted to go. I hope that in the future, mainstream secondary schools have more open conversations with disabled students about the option of part time timetables as I don’t think they are provided as willingly as they should be. Disabled students are always going to feel that pressure to keep up with the rest of their year groups but often they need to learn that it’s impossible to fit into a molde that wasn’t made for you.
Buttons and Ramps 