Spinning Plates: Navigating the Hidden Struggles of Life’s Transitions

"I can’t always communicate the support I need, meaning I’m spinning plates in the dark, fear rising inside me as all the transitions – all the changes – point and laugh at me until I drop the plates."

When I think about life transitions, I always think of the stereotypical ones: going to school, leaving school, going to university, getting a job, getting a house, getting married. But I often feel that these bigger transitions – things that you get warned will be rewarding but hard – fail to acknowledge all the smaller transitions involved.

When I was at nursery, I used to cry when we drove past it out of school hours to the point where my mum stopped driving past there entirely. At primary school, I used to cry in the summer holidays because I didn’t know what my new class would be like, what my teacher would be like, what my lessons would be like, or even whether I would like the classroom. The last two weeks of the summer ‘holidays’ were riddled with anxiety, stomach upset, and tears.

But there’s one specific transition as a child that caused intense distress. At the time, my family and I didn’t really understand what had caused it – it felt like it came from nowhere, a completely unanticipated event. When I started Year 6, I remember parents and students being constantly reminded about how important SATs were for setting you up for ‘success’. Getting good SATs determined what sets you were in in high school, and at 11 years old, being set up for high school truly felt like the be-all and end-all. I wholeheartedly believed – in my little anxious mind – that if I ruined my SATs, my entire life would be a complete and utter disaster.

The irony of fearing this transition and it’s accompanying pressure was that I ended up being very unwell – to the point where I had a significant period of time out of school. It wasn’t just the SATs that meant I was referred to a community mental health nurse at such a young age. The transition between school years, the impending transition to a new school, combined with the pressure of the ‘big tests’ was just simply too much.

My stomach hurt all the time, I felt sick and scared, and I only felt safe and calm at home with my mum. Change caused emotional distress, physical symptoms, and anxiety on a scale unknown even to me. The transitions were starting to catch up with me.

Whilst these transitions themselves are big, landmark changes, I know that there were other transitions within these which would have caused me distress. Growing up meant I got bigger, which meant I had to ‘transition’ into bigger shoes, which were new, which I didn’t like straight away. It meant new school clothes, new pads of paper, new pens – a whole load of things which I had to get used to using and only resulted in upset. Every new thing – every ‘small’ change to most people – felt like someone was pointing and laughing; as though it was a game to see if I managed to cope.

But at school and with the community mental health team, autism was never even considered.

I was simply an anxious child, a quiet child, the absolute delight to have in the classroom. But inside, there was this sickly whirlwind inside my body every single day, inevitably terrified by having to adjust to something. There was always an adjustment I had to make. The burden didn’t lie with my school, with the environment. It ended up lying with me.

Why am I writing about this now? In my Masters, we transition between modules roughly every seven weeks. Every seven weeks, I have a new module lead, sometimes new students, new webinar times, and, naturally, an almost obscene amount of new content to get to grips with. The reading list varies in how it’s presented, the platforms change, the PDFs don’t always download, you can’t always highlight them. The words on my screen don’t look quite right, I feel upset that my webinar times have changed without prior warning, I feel anxious about the weeks ahead and knowing what will come. I can’t always communicate the support I need, meaning I’m spinning plates in the dark, fear rising inside me as all the transitions – all the changes – point and laugh at me until I drop the plates.

It normally ends with plates on the floor. I end up clutching at the pieces of broken plate in a desperate attempt to put them back together. Once again, adjusting alone rather than someone simply spinning the plates with me.

Whilst transitions and changes incite anxiety in most people, I feel it’s important to remember that for some of us out there, even the transition from downstairs to desk is one that can be tough. It doesn’t mean we don’t want to do things, that we don’t want to achieve, that we don’t want to adjust – we just want patience and support. I’m just as capable and want just as much from my life as the next person.

Keep your heart and mind open. Listen for support requests, for access requests, for any adjustments someone may need in order to manage these transitions – big and small. Because despite all of this, some transitions bring me excitement as well as anxiety, but that’s normally when I have a good support network around me. Anxiety is one of those things that surrounds everything I do, but avoiding transitions is not the answer I want or need.

One day, I’ll have an army of support and a never-ending array of handy toolkits to get through any transition. I’ll plaster them all over the internet for everyone else to use. But for now, I’ll keep reflecting on what transitions mean to me, how they feel, and what I need to keep getting through them.

The biggest thing I need, is support with spinning the plates.