Mental health struggle

It's a shame that we are living in such a self-centered, individualist society.

Everything is always your own fault - a convenient way to shift blame from the abuser, onto the abused. We live in the age of the "myth of rugged individualism," where everything must begin and end with you.

This view is so prevalent even in psychiatry and therapy. While I must agree that you have to want to change, society must stop pretending that we, especially men, are hyperagent creatures-of-action that can perfectly bend the world around us to our will, and the only thing stopping us is our own incompetency.

I grew up in such an environment. I attended traditional schools, where strict gender roles were imposed upon boys, and "mental health" was not something you'd find in the all-female staff's vocabulary.

I will never forget when I started attending a prestigious, 8-year high school when I was 10, one full year younger than even my youngest classmate, and two years before I was really supposed to. By then, showing any emotion has already been beaten and screamed out of me by my teachers. The only measurable metric of success was good grades.

I was a fish out of water. Completely alone in a scary environment, where the curriculum consisted of rigorous math exercises, brutal essays where a single mistake would knock your grade down to D, and physics problems better suited for someone four years older than me.

It is no wonder I started struggling a little.

I reached out, and when no help came, I started struggling a lot.

I drew up my first plan to kill myself a month before I turned 11. I wanted to jump in front of a train, which would be passing close to my parents' house at 9:16. Of course, I wouldn't go to school that day, and I wanted to commit the act far away from home, as my mother told me multiple times that if I did end up killing myself, I had better not done it at home, so she wouldn't have had to clean up my remains.

I never went through with it, but I was fantasizing about it almost every day. I just wanted the struggle to end, to stop feeling like I was a burden to everyone around me, the lowest form of life that deserved no help. Because, even by that time, I was thoroughly taught that if I am not succeeding, it is my fault alone.

Around my second year of attending the school, one of the teachers thought it would be a good idea to round up the boys and parade them in front of the girls in our class. I wish I knew how it came to that, or that this was something that may not have been appropriate by any stretch of the imagination, The teacher instructed us to try our best to "show the girls why they should be dating us." When my turn came, all I remember now are the "eww"s and laughs I received.

"Maybe you really are not suited for school, you should drop out and work at a scrapyard," I was told by my third year by a math teacher after I failed her midterm exam.

"Let's see, ah, Bureš. The worst score of the whole class, again," she would exclaim loudly to the whole class when giving out the tests she marked that day.

"If you do not know how to solve this problem, just admit it like a man, get an F, and then leave this school," she would tell me when I was struggling with math problems I kept getting to solve daily, in unending public humiliation rituals.

Compassion never came.

Everything was always my fault, and if I wasn't succeeding, maybe I really wasn't cut out for school, and maybe I really should have dropped out of school to work at a scrapyard.

By this point, my exit plans have become more sophisticated. No longer did I want to jump in front of a train to get crushed. My new plan involved suffocating on helium. A painless death. By now, my only obstacle was money; I couldn't afford the helium tank and an inhalation mask on my very meager allowance of 20€ a month, a fact my father relished in. When I confided in him for the first time that I was not eating the whole day because I couldn't afford school lunches on just 20€ a month, his response of "then stop complaining and get a job" did not really surprise me in the slightest. And I never said anything important to him ever again.

Amidst this hell, I found myself drawn to a subject I never really considered: English. I was spending my whole day after school cooped up in my room, watching English videos on YouTube and playing games in English. It was easy, I have never had any friends, so there was nothing else I could do.

Somehow, I got very good at English, very quickly. I became one of the youngest people to attain the FCE certificate, in my case with absolutely no help or preparation, at just 15 years old. Two years before that, I was barely passing English classes, and now, I have conquered a challenge students spend years preparing for.

I was submitting articles to newspapers regarding economics, international relations, and societal analysis. Many of these articles were published in said newspapers.

But that did not help. It did not change anything

Nobody gave me the tiniest sliver of positive affirmation. Nobody cared about my success. I was still only defined by my failures.

And while everybody was complaining about my incompetency in Math and related subjects, nobody ever stepped up to help. Not teachers, not my parents. To them, I was just an idiot who did not belong to school, and was causing everyone trouble by having something as foreign to the human experience as needs. Needs for emotional comfort. Needs for safety. Needs for… anything.

When I finally sat the maturita exam, a celebratory close to my high school grind, the Physics teacher, whom I have had for the last five years, stormed to the board while I was answering a question on Mechanical Resonance and yanked my notes from my hand. No doubt to hide from the nearby government superintendent that a student who has had straight Ds and Es for the last seven years actually knows the material well enough to get an A, which would ring many bells and warrant an investigation into my treatment. At the end, I passed with a C, and their crisis was averted.

There was only one thing left to do: to attend a high-society social event, where we would finally receive our diplomas. While everyone else had their parents there to celebrate with them, I was alone. My mother was far away somewhere, advancing her own career. And my father? I don't even know what he was doing. But he was not there.

And when I finally came home, alone and on the verge of breaking into tears of relief that my torture was finally over, and into tears of anguish that I maybe really didn't deserve to even be alive, I had to put a smile on my face as I had to move a trash can for a neighbor. A truly fitting end.

While that finally brought a close to my eight years of torment, I still carry its effects to this day. And I can't say with any certainty that I will ever consider myself human, much less a normal one.