BARELY HOLDING ON

Chapter 3 – The Pressure of Schooling

Primary school was a small, quiet universe built on routine: four walls, a desk that fit my arms like a neat, small glove, and a teacher who believed in the power of repetition to carve a path through the confusion of growing up. The comfort lay not in the thrill of discovery but in the certainty of repetition. Tests, back pockets full of arithmetic rules, and the almost ritual sense that if you could memorise the steps, you would not stumble.

The bus ride to and from seven miles away gave the day its first rhythm. The bus doors opened to a morning air that smelled faintly of diesel and warranty, an ordinary scent that whispered: you are moving in the right direction. Mr or Mrs Frost were there with the smile of the day. The floor’s texture, the seat’s fabric, the seam of the bag that always sits in the same place against your leg, all these little textures formed a map of safety.

At school, I learned to read the room by the way the chalk dust settled on the desk when the teacher began to write. The sound of the clock, almost inaudible under the hum of voices, spoke of time as a friend you could count on.

Infants school saw me miss 2 of the three terms of kindergarten as mum decided we needed school one day in October, not February and the teachers found a bright youngster bubbling with potential, able to absorb information suitable for early promotion.

In Year 3 or Year 4, the line between ease and expectation begins to blur. I sit in the back row, the place I’ve claimed for comfort, the space where I can watch others and pretend not to care what they think about me. The teacher’s voice is a steady drum, counts, repeats, checks, yet my brain catches a different rhythm: a map of answers that never complains about the ink I use or the order in which I place them on the page. The world’s pace feels measured, predictable, something I can hold in both hands like a small, sturdy tool.

Then the new principal arrives, at the start of year 5, a man with a force behind him that seems to come from the way he carries his son’s presence in the hallways. His boy, my age, is a mirror that doesn’t reflect back the same light I was given. The leadership decision lands like a quiet pebble in a still pond: the principal’s son is named co-captain, not sole captain, as if to shield him from the tremor of a single spotlight or the failure of a vote as it perhaps should have been. The room shifts, the air clears and then thickens again, and I sense that my chance to be the sole captain, the only one who could bear the weight of that role, has been quietly reallocated. The social currency I had once earned through a simple display of capability now feels subject to an unseen bias, an arrangement that doesn’t require loud drama to alter the field.

This is not a drama that explodes into the room. It is a ripple. It is a shift in the room’s acoustics: the quiet sounds different now that another voice sits at the front of the class, the chalk dust settling a fraction heavier as if the air itself is listening for a new pattern. The arrangement changes the room’s geometry: who is seen, who is heard, who receives the leadership gaze. The talk of the two missing marks, two marks that should have stood with the rest and didn’t, moves through whispers and sideways glances, creeping into the corners of the desk and the line of a boy’s shoulder beneath a school jumper. In the car on the way home, in the kitchen’s yellow light, you hear the question again, softer this time but no less exact: “Where were the other two?” The father’s voice, calm and precise, becomes a map of what could have been mine had the edge of a few numbers tipped differently. And with the principal’s decision, his son named co-captain, not sole captain, the social space folds, just enough, so that the room’s centre of gravity shifts toward a shared leadership that wasn’t mine to claim alone. I do not call this injustice aloud at the time; I try to play the old game with the same answer, keeping calm, counting the steps and the pages as if they might still line up the way they used to. But the line between what I can control and what I cannot grows longer and thinner, a thread tugging at the collar, a seam loosening just enough to notice.

After primary school, the family’s car rides extend the same two miles from the house to the main road and the bus, into a larger distance: from seven miles ot the bus stop in the now twenty miles as secondary school becomes the daily map. The world expands, and with it, the demands.

In primary school I was to become the top student who can still solve the problems that matter, who can still arrange numbers and letters into neat, correct patterns. But the new school’s tempo, long corridors, new faces, a different permission structure, begins to erase what the old routine could do for me. The mumps arrive in Year 7, term 1, a fever that hugs the body and makes the brain slow, a muffled drum in a room that suddenly feels too bright, too loud, too much.

I lose most of that term, and by the time I return, the rest of the class is far farther ahead and catching up seemed improbable but not impossible. But there are not the same combatants as at the minute primary school. Here in high school, we have very similar if not more talented, pupils with a significant start. I still managed a fourth place in Year 7, the best of any male in the year, yet nowhere near my personal potential.

This is not a drama that explodes into the room. It is a ripple, a slow widening of the air as if a door were left ajar and then nudged a fraction more open. The pressure that follows me home from the front of the class doesn’t roar; it sits in the kitchen light, in the hum of the fridge, in the rhythm of chores that never quite end. The sofa becomes a temporary trench, a place to swallow the day and pretend the next task can wait just a moment longer. Homework is reduced to an occasional, begrudging entry on the to-do list, an unnecessary evil, a stubborn weight I try to move with as little fuss as possible because failure to complete the chores looms larger than any grade. The fear of retribution, an evening’s lecture, a quiet lecture in the car, a look that says I should have done more, hangs in the air like the stove’s warm breath, a reminder that I am always, in some sense, on guard.

There is, though, a stubborn need in the small slice of time I have to simply be me. The clock’s hands inch forward, and I slip into little pockets of escape: the dog at my feet, a window that frames a quiet yard, the soft glow of a lamp that doesn’t demand a checklist. I lose most of that term to the weight of the home’s unspoken economy, my attention pulled toward the next chore, toward the next boundary I must not cross, toward the fear of failing to keep everything in line, lest a whip or a riding crop cause a time to consider, the importance of someone else’s issues.

By the time I return to school, the line between my pace and the class’s pace has stretched into a widening seam. The rest of the year’s cohort has moved on, and the gap feels cavernous: catching up seems improbable, but not impossible, if I can borrow a breath here, a moment of quiet there, a way to align my own pace with a room that starts already ahead. There aren’t the same combatants as in primary school, the arena is larger, the talent sharper, the expectations louder, but the ground beneath me feels just as real: the weight of two missing marks from primary school, the memory of a calm I once knew, and the stubborn urge to find a way to belong without losing myself in the process. In high school, the competition is kinder to no one and harsher to everyone, and I am still learning how to measure my own small wins against a horizon that seems to keep stretching away. Yet even here, even with a fourth place in Year 7, the best I can claim among the boys, the ache remains: a sense that my personal potential sits somewhere just beyond reach, halved by fear and half-redeemed by the quiet, stubborn practice of simply staying in the room, listening, and trying again tomorrow.

High school abruptly changes how schooling and education were administered.

Richard Jones walks into a room with a mild authority that seems to hover over every desk. He suggests, with a quiet, practical tone, that we slow down, that we hear the subject instead of the fear. “Let’s keep it to a dull roar,” he says, and the line lands with a smack of truth that I can almost hear in slow motion. The phrase becomes a hinge, a way to reframe the world’s noise not as a threat but as a signal, a reminder that learning is less about the roar of passion and more about the patient, deliberate work of focusing.

Mrs. Berguland becomes a rare, bright memory in a darker year. She comments on an assignment as the best she has ever seen, a moment of warmth that makes a corner of the room glow. Yet the grade arrives, a 9.5, a score that feels like a ceiling rather than a doorway. The line between praise and pressure blurs. The accolade is a high height from which a fall could be dramatic, but the fall here is more a gentle slide into the next stage of a larger, more complicated map. The sense of being exceptional, of having a place in the school’s social economy, collides with the dawning awareness that the price of being “the smart one” grows heavier.

I dont believe I ever handed any homework in again after that episode. My protestation against “the man” and his, or in this case her, rules.

Peers come to me for help, and their confidence lends me a map I didn’t know I was holding. I become the person others rely on to explain the difficult things, to translate the new world into something manageable. It feels generous and tiring at once, the weight of leadership handed to someone who didn’t seek it but who must carry it now because the room’s life depends on someone to translate the complicated into the comprehensible. The body learns to hold more, the breath grows shallower, and the mind begins to measure its own value against more than just the next test.

Sports become another stage, a sanctuary where I can move weight with a sense of control that seems to vanish elsewhere. I compete across more than ten disciplines, testing endurance, speed, and teamwork with school representation. The field becomes a stage for a different kind of leadership, and I win a Sportsman of the Year title, a bright symbol perched on a shelf that gleams when the room’s lights hit it just so. The victory is real, but its shine casts a long shadow: it makes the space around me feel smaller, as if the room is a stage and the audience has become a chorus of expectations I must answer to every day.

Home life adds its own weather system to the year’s weather. The farm’s sale is announced, then falls through, a political moment that unsettles a community and sends a gust of rumour through the house. Leadership, once a badge I wore with a sense of purpose, becomes a vulnerability that surfaces in a way I cannot easily deflect. The loss is not spoken aloud as a dramatic reversal; rather, it appears in the quiet: in the way I’m passed over for captain’s duties in the grand final, in the way the practice schedule is altered to accommodate others’ needs, in the way the room’s energy shifts when you realise power can be redistributed without fanfare.

The HSC years press in, like a river that suddenly finds a new bend it cannot ignore. I picture a future in the air force, a future that seems to require a clean line, the kind of flight that exists only in a mind trained to see every part of its body as a single instrument. The dream becomes more than a plan; it becomes a moral test: can I bend the body to meet the future I want, or does the future bend to a more modest, more sustainable rhythm? The physical exam arrives with a quiet, clinical inevitability. It says: not today. The path I imagined slips away with a careful, almost gentle closing of the door.

This “failure” occurs just before the start of the forced Student vacation time, just prior to the HSC exams. The devastation of the failure leaves me in the doldrums. My dreams have been shattered.

Two weeks of shedding steel and wool, of long hours under a pale shed light, offers a different form of discipline. The shed becomes a sanctuary of repetition: count, cut, move, breathe. It isn’t a dream, but it is a practice that teaches a boy to endure without destroying himself in the process. The room’s temperature shifts with the day, the wool’s texture grows familiar under my fingers, and the rhythm of the work becomes a literal muscle memory that is reliable when the rest of life feels uncertain.

And then the quiet enters the room at the skin’s edge, the Black Dog, the Depression, a presence that does not announce itself with a roar but slides in through a window you didn’t know you left open. It is a chill you can feel in your bones when you wake and realise that the day’s light looks different, broader, and less forgiving. It doesn’t demand dramatic confession; it invites a slower, more careful attention to what is happening inside the body, to the breath, to the heartbeat, to the way the room’s corners seem to close in when you are asked to speak or perform.

This is not a drama that explodes into the room. It is a conundrum pressed into the quiet at the end of the day, a weight that sits on the bench beside the tools and wool. The fear of failure, of failing to finish chores, of letting the house slip back into chaos, of losing the thread that holds the day together, presses with a steady gravity. And with that fear comes a second path, a possible way out that isn’t a scream but a whisper: the shed, where a gifted student might vanish into the rhythm of clippers, wool, and sunlight filtering through corrugated steel. The question isn’t simply about grades or captains or who sits at the front of the class. It’s about a choice that feels as if it has already been made in the private corners of the house: stay in the sheds where income is predictable, where the body meets the work with a familiar, almost-lullaby rhythm, and where the tempo of life is defined by the rhythm of the tether that binds you to a home you can’t quite leave behind, even as it holds you back.

The income from working in the sheds is more than enough to maintain a semblance of stability within the parameters of home. It buys groceries, pays the occasional bill, keeps the car running for the weekly trip to school. It also keeps the house’s quiet violence, the low thrum of fear, the sharp edges of shouting, the way a room’s air suddenly grows heavier, at bay enough that a leaver’s life outside feels almost reckless. And yet the very thing that stabilises the day, the money, the predictable routine, the narrow corridor of safety, also locks me into a future that might not fit the person I am becoming. The two missing marks I carried from earlier years echo in the moment: a precise reminder of what could have been, a tally of what was lost to a different set of priorities, a different kind of pressure.

High school broadens the stage. The crowd is larger, the audience louder, the talent sharper, the competition more even and more relentless. Here, the battlefield is crowded with capable minds and hands that move with equal precision. I land in Year 7 with a fourth place that’s respectable, certainly the best among the boys in the year, but it sits like a single bright coin in a large, dark pocket: a reminder that my personal potential might be elsewhere, waiting beyond the edges of the room, beyond the counts on a sheet, beyond the sound of the bell. The gap between where I am and where I could be feels both a wound and a possibility, a draft of wind that edges the window open to a future I’m not sure I can reach by the method I’ve known.

And then comes the conundrum in plain sight: if I stay, the sheds feed the family, steady the day, keep the home’s routine intact, and shield me from the storm of violence that never fully goes away. If I go, I chase a different future, one that promises risk, risk of a new kind of failure, risk of letting the home’s quiet gravity pull me under before I can learn a new way to breathe. The money isn’t a trap so much as a lighthouse: it shows a path that could keep me safe, but it also casts the horizon with a shade of “not enough” if my mind doesn’t grow into a broader view of myself.

There is the comfort of a familiar method replaced by the pressure of new roles, the weight of being expected to solve everything, the sense that there is always another threshold to cross, another exam to ace, another field to win. And yet the throughline, “you are not alone,” shifts from a line traced on a page to a line spoken aloud in the heart. I am not the only one who has learned to bear a weight that wasn’t mine to choose. The road remains, even if the engine coughs a little and the wind outside the shed rattles the loose boards.

The question isn’t simply “where to now?” but “how to keep moving when the day’s demands outpace the body’s pace, and when the mind learns to resist the bright, tempting shortcuts of a single, clear future?” The answer is not a single act of courage, but a slow, careful practice: naming the pain without glamour, seeking help without shame, letting others bear some of the load, and walking forward, step by step, with the sense that the road itself is a teacher, not a trap. And if I can speak to you across the page, I want you to hear this: you are not alone. The weight we carry is part of a shared map, and the path through it is something we learn by listening to our bodies, by naming what hurts, and by keeping the door open for the next small act of care. The conundrum remains, but so does the possibility of choosing again: not a grand escape, but a quieter, steadier way to move through the day, with eyes open to both the danger and the light.