Fear, stress and quest for perfection

This follows my recent reminiscing about Middle School days.

I clearly didn't enjoy that segment of time; I was bore and nothing that was pushed on me elicited any interest. My sole school passion was doodling sports cars (I know, I should have been an automobile stylist) and entertaining my classmates.

Maybe I was a late-bloomer or fell into a strange, hibernation-like hiatus, I don't know for sure, but my memories around that period are quite scarce, if not mentally repressed. Strange for a person as competitive and result-oriented as I can be.

As a result, my grades suffered tremendously and the fear of staying back one year or getting kicked out were creating an almost unbearable angst in me. I was always terrified by every single school day, which meant that I was spooked five days out of seven.

In winter, my only wish, my sole forceful prayer, was for our school bus to skid on the icy road and end up in the ditch so I wouldn't have to face school and another day of failure.

There was in particular a section of the school bus route, called “Le Bochard” which had a series of treacherous hairpin turns and I was visualizing the bus slowly flipping over into the trees below, along with a “no school” pay-off flashing, like you'd see then on any pinball machine.

That is exactly at that time that I discovered that praying for events we don't control is a total waste of time. That's also around the moment when I decided to leave that cursed middle-school and start my life anew in Cluses, an army-like institution, where there was absolutely no room for daydreaming or screwing around.

I had realized that all that fear and stress were slowly killing me and that it was time to get back to normalcy!