Taha Husain
Professor Patton
ENG 1301 S02
14 February 2015
Narrative Essay
As a carefree person throughout my childhood I became truly distressed when I moved to Bahrain. The fact that I left my whole childhood behind in Pakistan made me miserable and to make it worse I joined a private school in Bahrain which was more of a prison than a place where youth were taught. I spent seven years in that school and by the time I graduated I would have been a nervous wreck if it wasn’t for my friend Abed.
Just to give you an idea of how strict my school was our school’s owner was a military figure and the school itself displayed this in every aspect. Every playground was surrounded on three sides by reinforced bars and the fourth side by locked doors. These doors were locked in order to prevent students from wandering around the premises during break time. Students were also prevented access to most areas which were still under construction. Whereas the areas that children were allowed to enter were all monitored by cameras and a supervisor. To make sure that disciplinary reform was instilled in the school all the supervisors were former military members. To sum it up I spent my teen years in an expensive juvenile hall.
Truth be told I was not worried as much about the military doctrine of my school as I was by the immense amount of examinations I had. For example during sixth grade I had six exams every week throughout the year. This number increased annually and by the time I was a senior I had fourteen exams a week. In order to keep in pace with everything I dedicated all of my free time doing homework and studying for my upcoming tests. For example, every day we had a two hour break which most of my class mates spent playing a rudimentary version of soccer. Whereas I was always in the cafeteria, with an equally stressed colleague, staring down at a book that I needed to read for the following day. Spending every day of my life like that took a toll on my mind. What made it worse was that loneliness had taken hold of me after I left my whole family in Pakistan and this took me to the absolute limit of my sanity. Weeks later I started to believe that I was severely ill even though I was not. I used to visit the nurses and tell them about my self-diagnosis. I did this in order to go home where I knew I would be content, but I was denied each and every time. Stress ran amok my mind throughout my first year and it caused me to have anxiety outbursts. An example can be my first day when I ran out of class, whilst fighting back my tears, to the bathroom. Eventually I started to make a lot of friends who were also traumatized by the system and they helped me take control of my feelings.
Two years later I saw the same anxiety in a new student named Abed. He used to stress the smallest things in life and an after effect of this was that he started losing hair by the time we were graduating. Abed reacted to stress as if he was allergic to it. His reaction started with him panicking and ended with him contemplating his future. One such case was when Abed and I just finished our Chemistry AP and had our usual chat. ‘That was intense wasn’t it?’ I inquired. ‘Yeah it was alright’ he replied. I continued by saying