Hello, I’m Emilia, 14F (almost 15) and I am a school refuser. I was diagnosed with autism when I was 11 and ever since January of this year my attendance has dramatically decreased from a mixture of burnout, sensory overload, and I’m honestly just scared of school because I’ve had a lot of trauma around it.
I teach myself, and I’m actually thriving with teaching myself— I’ve understood everything 10x quicker and easier without intimidating teachers and loud, stuffy classrooms.
I haven’t been in ages and my lovely teachers have been trying to support me, and it’s helped for a bit, but look where I ended up. I was supposed to go in for just an hour today, but my heart was pounding, I was shaky, crying, and my mum didn’t want to force me to go like this.
Today we got an email that was quite firm, and it was clear they meant legal business. It’s either I start to go to school again, or we homeschool with tutors, which we just don’t have the money for. This caused me to kind of freak out, and today I broke my 2 years and 9 months streak of being self harm free.
I have to go to school tomorrow. I’m so so scared. They’re going to have to drag me out. Everyone is going to be staring at me. I feel rooted to the ground.
I don’t know why I made this post, I just needed to get this off my chest. Is anyone else going through a similar thing or has experience…? It would really help me, thank you.