When I think about what learning at school was like for me, I would say that despite being in top sets, it was incredibly hard.

Inside of me, I had so much going on, but it wasn’t noticed, and so I carried a sense of shame about how I felt. I always had a feeling that I wasn’t good enough, because even when I tried, teachers would say I could do better.

What they didn’t see was the enormous pressure and anxiety that took over my body on a daily basis. Combined with the length of lessons and the enormous amount of words and information we were expected to absorb, it made me feel fidgety, bored, and angry.

A lot of the anxiety came from environmental factors, and that was before I even got to school. Before school, there was remembering everything, even what day it was could flummox me. Then I had to pack my bag according to the day and get to school on time. I was almost at capacity before the day had even started. But no one noticed this either, because, well, this is just stuff you do.

Now, I’m going to be honest about school itself, it was, to all my senses, disgusting. It smelt, people smelt, and desks and chairs had been touched by hundreds of others. The noise and busyness were, to my overloaded brain, utter chaos.

And while all this was buried deep inside me, it felt essential for survival. The place was filled with people wanting to call you out, catch you out, and humiliate you. I didn’t understand what it would take to avoid those words, the ones that cut deep inside me. Words that engulfed my whole body, but which I tried to smother and bury.

This was a place that required the suppression of all that I really felt everything I was managing just to survive.

This had nothing to do with learning. I loved books, drawing, art, and history, but school made it hard, rigid, even. It dulled it and wanted it formulated.

The place that saved me was the art room. It had things in there, wooden objects, dried flowers, tons of books and pictures. It even smelt like home. I went there whenever the teachers would let me.

Second best was History, where we got to discuss and debate, and think about different viewpoints.

The antithesis of this was Maths, a sterile room with a teacher who couldn’t see why relevance might help anchor my understanding of seemingly pointless trigonometry. If she had at least said, “Imagine you are self-employed and need to save for VAT and tax, this is a way to help with that,” I might have engaged. Instead, I was angry, frustrated, bored, and disruptive in these lessons.

Even English, a subject I loved, was flattened out by a teacher who had to regurgitate Shakespeare for his eighth year running and you could tell. I wanted to know it, to understand it, but the monotone delivery, combined with a class that had completely lost interest, made it impossible to hold any of that old but new language in my head.

I didn’t want this to be how life would be that my intelligence and ability to learn would be measured by my capacity to endure an environment that made me feel ill, anxious, bored, and frustrated. If this was learning, I didn’t want to do it there. I would find my own way, and this became a mantra I carried into adulthood.

I never stuck at anything academic after 16. I tried, I did bits and bobs, but as soon as assessment and formality crept in, so did the familiar pressure and anxiety, and I checked out.

No, learning, for me, would happen from the safety of home, through conversations with friends and family, books, films, and exploring things in my own way. Grades would always be a barrier I didn’t want to overcome.

Extract from Could Try Harder by Eliza Fricker published May 2026 and available to pre order from all good bookstores now.