There was a year I didn’t have any of this. Just a closed door, a stomach-drop feeling every morning, and no idea if it would ever feel normal again. I didn’t know a racing heart wasn’t defiance. I didn’t know frozen at the door wasn’t “giving in.” I found all of this out the hard way, one exhausted morning at a time, mostly by getting it wrong first. One school year she missed over 100 days. 
But she successfully graduated with entry into her first choice uni and degree. Nothing about that turnaround was luck. It came from years of psychologist appointments, from trial and error on what actually helped and what didn’t, what I already knew from my university mental health study, and researching everything I could get my hands on about what was actually happening in her body. It was learning to read her body before I tried to reason with her mind, tool by tool, until mornings stopped being a fight neither of us could win. The toolkit is everything I wish I’d had on day one. Not ...