Maëva Muratori

Memoirs of an Anxious Teen Maëva Muratori

Monday morning, the first year of high school. For a month now, I have been getting up to go to class. Today is an ordinary day; however, something inside of me has changed. It feels like I am carrying a weight. A knot has settled inside my stomach and it makes me want to vomit. I can't eat anything and though I don't feel physically weak, I feel internally weak. I don't know why, but today seems impossible for me to face. I don't have the strength to attend high school this morning and pretend that I am ok. My mother reassures me that the feelings I am experiencing will eventually pass, but I wished that it would pass faster; much faster than that. Maëva, at the age of 15, began to suffer with school phobia upon starting her first year in high school. Her anxiety attacks led her little by little into an infernal spiral. She dropped out of school, failed to complete correspondence courses, developed a social phobia, and then, finally, was hospitalized in a psychiatry ward for two years. This observation of the psychiatric medical profession is clear: the proposed care and follow-up cannot lead to a total recovery, and it is necessary to learn to 'live with it' and to control her anxieties as well as possible. But in this desperate situation, her encounter with God changed everything. Today, she is completely healed and has written a book that she would have liked to have read during this desperate time in her life.