My Worries as a Student (Upper Secondary School Days)

Hi all,

I'm going to officially start with my postings with this post. I will be posting mainly about my worries about life over the past 21 years BUT please do not think that I am a very negative, sad or pessimistic person. I just feel that there are more worries to share and write about, as compared to happy things. Well, to start off, I am still a student and will be entering university in August this year. 

I had a few issues when I was a student back in junior college and secondary school. I guess I'll start off with my secondary school days, specifically my upper secondary school days (I didn't really want to talk much about my lower secondary days now since I didn't really had a lot of worries then. But I might share about it in future posts.)

When I was in Secondary 3 (15 y/o), I started to figure out how to study smart (I guess?) and started topping the class from Sec 3 mid years all the way till 'O' levels (which is taken at the end of Secondary 4). Now, you might think what's the problem here? Sounds like a smart guy bragging about his results. No, it's obviously more than that. 

Although I've topped the class before, every (single) time there's an upcoming exam, I'll have frequent stomach aches and diarrhea. I'll always worry that I might not do well in the upcoming exam. You might think what's there to worry about when I'm smart enough to top the class yet again. To be honest, I didn't exactly know why I had such an issue. I guess it was due to stress. Maybe I was stressed due to peoples' expectations for me to get number 1 again. However, my parents never had such huge expectations on me. Furthermore, I've told myself countless times that it was alright if I didn't do as well as the previous exam. Yet, the aches didn't stop.

The worse case was right before my Chinese 'O' Level Examinations (in May 2012) which was taken six months before the other subject papers.  I had a huge stomach ache in the morning. I released one round when I was at home and when I reached school, I had to rush to the toilet for another round of SHIT diarrhea. Thankfully, during the paper itself, the pain subsided and I was able to do complete the paper. 

My mum eventually brought me to see a doctor about my frequent diarrhea as it came to a point where I constantly had the urge to go the toilet back then. (This was most probably in Aug/Sep 2012 and 'O' Levels was on Oct/Nov 2012.)  The doctor said that it wasn't some sort of disease/illness (like indigestion) but it might be some form of irritable bowel syndrome. Nevertheless, he wanted to take a sample of my bowels and take a test. So, this is the problem. I have to dig my own bowels out from the toilet bowl (which is disgusting at all levels). 

Well, I still did it. (I'm going to apologise in advance if you're eating and reading this at the same time.) I had to use a plastic spoon to scoop out like a portion of my bowels and place it inside a plastic box (or cylinder). Now comes the worse part. As soon as I dipped the spoon into the water inside the toilet bowl, the spoon hit the bowel and the bowel dropped down to the bottom of the toilet bowl (it was floating before that). I had no choice but to have a portion of my fingers dipped into the water as well in order to scoop out the bowel. As soon as I got it out, I immediately went to scrub my hands with soap and washed it clean. 

Unfortunately Thankfully, after the test, the doctor concluded that I had irritable bowel syndrome and it was entirely psychological. Well at least it's not a physical illness. From then on, I tried to calm myself down and frequently comforted myself and told myself not to be so worried. My diarrhea actually continued till the end of 'O' Levels. After that, it actually stopped! (Obviously I still do have diarrhea once in a while but that's due to bad food and not stress.) The surprising thing was that it didn't return during my preparation for 'A' Levels (in Junior College)! I had other worries during my Junior College days and I'll share about it in my next post. 

Okay, now onto some peer issues during my secondary school days. Ever since I topped the class during mid years in Sec 3, my classmates started to look at me in a different way. I don't know why but they have that impression where I can solve any problems given to me, don't play any games and just spent the entire time at home studying. I hated that treatment at first. To be VERY honest, I had no intentions of topping the class. I just studied as usual and that was the result that I had obtained. I wasn't even expecting such a result in the first place. Of course I am happy with my performance but how the impressions of me changed wasn't very pleasing. For example, when I couldn't solve a math problem, someone would just say that since I can't solve it, no one else can. It was pretty annoying to be honest. 

Well, I ACTUALLY got used to it eventually and just went with the flow. Like if one of my classmates asked whether I've played a particular game before, I'll just say that I've never played it before since all I do at home is study. Then, we'll just laugh it off and move on. It wasn't that bad after a while since I actually got the chance to talk some of my classmates that I never really talked to before (There were 41 of us in one class and I was sitting at one end of the class. So I didn't really had the chance to talk to the rest at the other end of the class.)

So, that's all I have for my upper secondary school days for now. In my next post, I'll share about my Junior College days and I have to say I had a different set of worries altogether. You might have noticed that I didn't share about my Co-Curricular Activities (CCA) in Secondary School. I'll most probably dedicate one whole post on that. So, stay tuned! Anyways, thanks for reading my post and have a great day ahead!

- Alan