She had felt the slow trickle of fear all summer at home. She was four years old and the school was just around the corner. I felt like a doomed child. That summer’s sun felt like the last heat he would ever feel.

So I was there. In front of the school classroom door. It opened. A wall of sensations came out of the classroom and flooded me.

The sensations coincided with a previous episode that caused anxiety in my life. I was left in hospital for two weeks as a two year old without my parents as I was recovering from a bad dose of croup. Now these sensations bypassed my thinking brain and went directly to my amygdala, causing an amygdala hijack.

I froze.

I would sit in class every day and when every expectation to speak arose I would feel the same phobic reaction. I couldn’t move.

Classmates asked me simple questions and got no answer. The teachers would call the roll and get no response. I couldn’t ask to go to the bathroom. In fact, I couldn’t even raise my hand to get the teacher’s attention. At recess, I followed the others to the playground and then stuck to the wall or went around nowhere.

I remember the time when my brush dried up and I couldn’t ask anyone to pass the paint pot, so I moved the still wet but dry paint around the page hoping no one would notice.

The time I didn’t wear a coat to school despite the freezing weather just so I could get to my desk first and not have to ask my neighbor to move. My neighbor would be busy hanging his coat, you see.

The thought of speaking and the emotion that might lead to speaking brought up the phobic reaction. I was attacked from two fronts.

The lack of response led to harassment and exclusion.

At home I was different. I played on the road with my friends. I talked, I yelled and I yelled. Sometimes though, the thought of going to school would hit me and I would double over wherever I was. Other times, someone might show up from school and then the phobia would strike again. The older I got, the less relief my home life offered me, until phobia and mutism also took over.

This lasted for the entire thirteen years of my secondary, elementary, and high school education.

My school years were definitely not the best years of my life.