Four decades later I still dream about my secondary school final exams as if it was yesterday. I can still sense the hellish, untameable anxiety that I carried throughout that unnecessarily demanding year when the smallest academic blip could launch me into a debilitating state of catastrophe.
So it’s no surprise that my heart goes out to those year 12 Queensland students who learned on the eve of their final history exam that they’d studied the wrong Roman emperor – Augustus rather than his great uncle Julius Caesar, upon whom the test would focus.
On reading about this I had a visceral reaction like I would on hearing breaking chalk or finger nails scraping down the blackboard. I went cold. My breath shortened. These poor students and their parents. Their pain was mine.
Anxiety’s malevolent tendrils can grip us at the least convenient and logical of times. No matter how I might intellectualise a potentially challenging situation I’ve always found it easy to foresee the worst.
A family member (could anxiety actually be genetic or is it just learned by our progeny?) recently advised me before a potentially challenging public appearance: “Just imagine the absolute worst-case scenario – and then when it doesn’t happen you’ll be really pleasantly surprised.”
I always know when I’m irrationally anxious because I experience the same dream. In it I turn up to my year 12 English Lit exam having read all of the novels on the syllabus many times. Bathsheba Everdene of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd lived rent-free in my teenage head for all of my 18th year, along with Pip and Miss Havisham and Magwitch from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.
But when I go into the study hall, sit at my desk and turn the exam paper over, there are no questions about these books. Instead the exam focuses on novels (and a comic!) I’ve never heard of. I wake up sweating, my heart palpitating.
This dream is the same one that I had many nights in the year when I was actually studying for my Victorian high school certificate exams. I dream this scenario today with the same potent sense of dread.
It’s a classic, not so subconscious, anxiety response of course – the impossible exam of my dreams a clunky metaphor for whatever potentially daunting grown-up situation I’m facing. It’s never actually happened – but it might’ve. And I know, from talking to school and university mates for over 40 years now, that this is a common dream among even the mildly anxious. So I have to wonder today just how it might feel if I had to face the reality on the eve of an exam, like those kids in Queensland, that I really had somehow studied the wrong novels or syllabus – which is to say emperor.
In a word, I’d say, shattered. Perhaps paralysed. Terrified even.
We put so much store in traditional schooling success, place so much pressure on our young from such an early age to succeed at school, that many of those Queensland students affected (notwithstanding the special consideration they’ll be given) would regard the situation as genuinely disastrous.
Some people, in their anxiety dreams, find themselves partially naked when they walk on stage to give a speech or sing a song. Others are chased by lions in their local parks, or sharks in their swimming pool or jump out of the plane on their first solo sky-dive without a parachute. In the end it’s the same thing as dreaming about the exam you haven’t studied for.
While anxiety has its focus on the unknowable, unpredictable, uncontrollable future, an actual realised threat can present as another more concrete, frightening, perplexing matter. So many people this week – callers to radio stations and on social media – sympathised and expressed compassion for those young people who, powerless to change things, had to confront their fear and sit the exam they couldn’t possible study for.
It was all so relatable, for the essence of being human is survival – the avoidance of failure where possible.
A much older person who stressed through year 12 and still vividly re-experiences its anxieties in dreams might advise those young people that school is but one gateway to a happy and productive life. Or that terrible, more challenging things happen in life that school can’t prepare us for – even if its emotional legacies can never quite be exorcised.
Regardless, right now they all deserve As for resilience.
