Pressure

A thousand words (or so) on pressure

'They fuck you up, your mum and dad' - Philip Larkin

I wanted to enter this contest, you see, so I sat down and though to myself, 'why not write a thousand words on pressure? and call it 'A Thousand Words on Pressure?' Ironically I am now under pressure to write a thousand words on pressure. I have that debased-gut sensation I get before exams when I think I'm going to fail, and I write my name in a weird quivering script as slow as possible because I don't want to read the questions. The worst pressure I have ever been under has always stemmed from exams. Or rather, the worst pressure I have ever been under has always stemmed from the weight of expectation placed upon me by my parents in the face of exams. When I was younger, the thing that scared me the most - more than spiders, severe physical injury or the police - was that bone-deep fear of my mother and father. For some reason, it was always exams that brought this upon me more than anything. I could always cope with their anger; I was a bona fide miscreant as a child and I grew a sort of emotional callous to it. What always hit me a lot harder, though, was their disappointment. When I knew that I had been expected to perform on some stage, academic or otherwise, and had let them down. Their disappointment stung the most because it it was a lot more personal that when I was cocking about with a football and broke a window or had spectacular fights with my sister. The looks they gave me, the sighs and shakes of the head, they all seemed to say, 'I put so much time and effort into you, and this is the result?'  

The first time I really felt it was at one of the many parents' evenings I was forced to attend with my mother during secondary school. I was a class clown, for various reasons I won't go into. At primary school I had always got away with it because I was bright and popular, but at secondary school everything was different; everything was suddenly more solemn and serious. I felt like a tipsy wedding guest who had accidentally stumbled into the wake next door. They sure as hell made us dress like mourners; black trousers and blazer, white shirts, understated red and black tie. Apparently somebody had throttled all the fun associated with youth and made us all file past its open casket in an orderly line of white, middle-class children dressed like penguins. I didn't like it, so I messed around and ended up getting something of a reputation as a troublemaker.  Having complete strangers referring to your son as such (and worse) must cut pretty deep. Those first parents evenings, my mum didn't say a word on the way home in the car. She had this stony expression that I still remember as if it hangs in portrait on my wall to this day. When we got back she didn't hit me, she didn't even raise her voice by much, she just shook her head to herself and breathed audibly though her nose. I felt horrible; like I had insulted her, my mother, personally and on some deep and profound level that only people you really know can ever reach. I began to shape up, slowly, and got good marks in my GCSEs, but they were ridiculously easy. It was the A-levels that were the worst of all.

I had taken the rather bold step of not selecting an insurance option in my application to university; that is, unless I got very good marks, I wouldn't be going. Most people will put down a second choice in the event that they don't do quite so well as expected, but in a moment of teenage impetuousity I had forsaken this academic safety-net. Now I was faced with the prospect of either working my brain to the stem, or failing and being unemployed with crappy A-levels in a house with two extremely disappointed parents whose good name I was tarnishing. The prospect was quite excruciatingly daunting. Did I study? Good lord no. I procrastinated and did token hours of revision when they were around, then read and watched TV and played games when they weren't. I would either go to bed extremely late and sleep into the afternoon, or not sleep at all and go to the gym at the break of dawn to swim and read the papers over coffee. I was not prepared for the exams, and felt downright miserable after each one. I work frantically into the small hours in those final few days, desperately cramming knowledge into my brain and berating myself for not working harder. When I went back to school to pick up my results, I felt that same old feeling stirring in the pit of my stomach. That feeling of fear not just of my parents, but that this time I had fucked up good and proper and had wasted all of the time and effort invested in my by my poor mum and dad. I opened the manila envelope with the statements of results in without breathing, without hearing, without seeing anything but the three figures followed by a slash and then another three figures that represented my future. I had attained one grade A and two Bs. It didn't meet the conditional offer that my university had specified. I would have to ring them and see what they said.

I remained in this state of limbo for some three days, facing the inevitable snips like 'maybe if you'd revised harder...' and the like, and that feeling just would not go away. Every time the phone rang it would spread across my whole abdomen like a subtle stabbing pain. I knew that if the selection committee at the university decided that I hadn't made the cut, I would be faced with the confirmation that my parents' faith in me had been woefully misplaced. An unpleasant reality in anybody's book. The tension in the house was so thick you could almost see it, hanging in the air like steam when the bathroom door is left open. Every time I did anything that was not moping, eating or sleeping I had to endure grave faces and morose glances filled with this bizarre and hostile sympathy. My parents felt bad for me, they knew how upset I would be if I was rejected, and that just made it worse; but at the same time they themselves were upset at me, as well as for me. Eventually I was told I had been accepted, and I was so relieved that the feeling of all that tension ebbing away exhausted me, and I had to have a nap. The mood in the house returned to normal, and I could prepare for my much anticipated gap-year. I got a couple of jobs, went on the dole for a while and eventually managed to get away from it all as I had wanted, but it so very nearly never happened. Now I'm at university and I'm expected to do extremely well, but since the first year counts nothing towards the final grade, the pressure is most definitely off. For now.