Am I Ugly? by Michelle Elman

Author:Michelle Elman [Elman, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Eating Disorders & Body Image, Non-Fiction, Personal Growth, Personal Memoirs, Self-Esteem, Self-Help
ISBN: 9781788541831
Google: 1dlADwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B076593CN2
Publisher: Anima
Published: 2018-07-11T23:00:00+00:00

19

How long could I keep hiding my scars?

At St Keyes, Oxbridge was the ultimate goal. Every single girl was driven to academic success: attaining the gold-merit status of being accepted into either Oxford or Cambridge – even if it meant mental breakdowns from the pressure and grind of continuous tests and mocks, routinely overdosing on caffeine, escalated bickering and competitiveness with classmates and working until all hours of the night (now that we didn’t have allocated bedtimes).

This unhealthy high-wire act took over the last eighteen months of St Keyes for a majority of us. Of the ninety girls in my year, only three girls had the strength to deviate from the crowd. They weren’t applying. I have to confess that I admired them. I dreamed about joining their bandwagon and becoming the fourth. I knew that I didn’t want to go, I knew I would hate it, and more importantly I was unsure I could stand the academic pressure of working at this intensity for two more years – but at the same time I didn’t want to be judged by my peers.

Not applying to Oxbridge was seen as an admission that you weren’t smart enough; I feared that judgement and underestimated my ability to go against the crowd and resist the norm. And maybe I still had something to prove. My parents were excited for me and had contacted St Keyes to discuss my application. How could I possibly let them down? The problem was, my grades leading into final exams that year had suffered with me taking a greater interest in my extracurriculars, whether it was running Enigma or being an officer and in charge of all charity functions at the school.

I was in my last year in Rodin House so it was fitting that Miss Naylor was the person who came to my aid in the last month before my departure, almost as repentance for all the past body-shaming comments. She looked at all my courses, the material I needed to cover, and planned out every hour of every day for the following two weeks – exactly which module and which subject I would be studying at every second of the day. ‘You will cancel anything that you don’t need to do,’ she advised me. ‘Everyone will understand; getting your grades up are your priority. Stop spending time socializing. You will either be in lessons or in your room studying, and that is it.’

Miss Naylor could be seen to be an evil person but while her strict rules were annoying and at times suffocating, it mattered to me that she cared. This was rare compared to the other housemistresses, and I believed it was in these moments that she showed her true self. And her plan for my academic rehabilitation worked far better than her attempts to get me to diet. By the time I looked up from my books and emerged from social isolation, I had attained not only three As in my AS levels, but

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