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March 29, 2024, 09:33:33 am

Author Topic: Year 12s & ATARs - thoughts  (Read 1017 times)  Share 

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Bri MT

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Year 12s & ATARs - thoughts
« on: October 29, 2018, 07:55:13 pm »
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Drowning. Sinking. Buried. Burdened. Overwhelmed.

Tired. Stressed. Irritated. Frustrated. Disappointed.


From what I can see, things are pretty difficult for many of you right now. These feelings seem to keep popping up and sometimes they can feel all consuming. It's ok. I don't just mean that it will be ok, I mean that it is ok right now. It's ok to feel like this. You're enduring like this - as hard as it is.

Stuck.

It's can be easy to feel like a disappointment in year 12. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent in tears thinking I wasn't enough. That what I was doing wasn't enough. In the end of year 12 I'd gotten an ATAR 10 points higher than the duxes in the past couple of years and duxed all of my subjects but even if I'd known that back then it wouldn't have stopped me from feeling like I did sometimes. In my mind I held wasted potential - or maybe I was just not talented & had tricked people into thinking I could be - and if I got that ATAR, those study scores, then I could enter utopia (and if I didn't I would be horribly crushed). It didn't quite work like that. In the end I did get that ATAR (even if I only got some of those study scores) and it was alright. So much time on stressing and feeling miserable yet in the end it didn't mean all that much.

Some people have different - sometimes highly emotional -  ATAR reveal experiences, and that's ok too. I'm just not sure why so many of us tell ourselves that it matters over and over again and use it as a proxy for worth and achievement. Yeah sure, academic achievement is one thing, but why hold that higher than your health, personal development etc? Again, it's ok if academic achievement is something important to you - it's still important to me too - but it doesn't have to be. You decide that, and overtime, you can change that.

I wish I knew how to explain you the experience of letting go of your scores and how little you can make it mean. You can make it into a forgotten memory if you want. I wish I knew how to show you that you're probably holdng more tightly onto it while it doesn't exist than you will once it materialises.

it's ok to hold tight now, and if you're holding tightly enough that you feel constricted you have my empathy, please try to remember that you can let go later, even if that seems fictional now.


The ATAR is one key among many into courses. It's useful, but never more useful than you.