For a lot of students high school can be tough; friendship drama, grades and puberty can be difficult to deal with.
On top of that Paris, a student at Sir Joseph Banks High School in Sydney’s south-west, also had to deal with severe anxiety and depression - along with having to help financially support her family.
“Even though my grades were very high it wasn't good enough for me. So then I would get more anxious and more sad about it and then I would kind of just cycle and cycle,” she tells Insight’s Jenny Brockie.
Due to her spiralling mental health struggles, Paris missed 103 days of school in year 9 – almost half the year.
“Because I was away so often I would miss out on so much content that when I came back it was so hard for me to catch up.”
“I felt like if I went back then I'd be embarrassed because everyone had this kind of opinion that I was a very smart person but then when I went there I couldn't uphold that so it just made me very anxious.”
Thankfully Paris had the support of her school who encouraged her to get back into learning – starting off attending just one class a day to eventually attending full time.
School youth worker, Jenny Croft, was able to provide Paris with coping mechanisms to help her deal with her anxiety and offer her a quiet place, the drop in room, to calm down if she was feeling overwhelmed.
“With Jenny she's helped me realise ‘oh, what are my triggers? Like why do I get so anxious about things? How do I ask for help sooner’ and that's why I think I attend a lot more now,” she says.
But as Paris managed to get her schooling back on track her home life was cracking.
Living at home with her mum and older brother, money at home became tight for Paris’ family as health issues prevent her mum from working. So she picked up a part time job to help pay the bills.
From year 10 onwards she was working 35 hours a week, along with juggling school.
“I have to focus more so on work sometimes than school which is kind of hard,” she says, adding that in 2016 she took an entire year off solely to work.
“I kind of thought that if I could put my education on hold just for a little bit and … just pay off some bills and things like that to get us out of the bad situation, then maybe when I came back I could focus more on my education instead of brushing it aside,” Paris explains.
And Paris did just that, surprising her teachers by returning to school for a fresh start at year 11. Now in year 12, she has cut down on work to focus all of her energy into her education and future.
“I know I want to go to university but at the end of the day I just want to be as proud of myself as all the teachers and everyone is of me,” she says.
