|| ooc. talked today to my psychiatrist about my resurfaced anxiety attacks again and we both agreed that it's most likely due to my premenstrual syndrome which fucks with me anyway monthly. for now i will take twice the dosis the week before i my menstruation begins and let's hope that works out.
pms: we want the bread
me: we don't have any tho
pms: there's lemon cake!
me: i don't even like lemon cake tho
pms: GIVE US THE CAKE
me: TURNS OUT I LOVE LEMON CAKE
OKAY SCREW THIS HIATUS THING I’m just going to. TALK about stuff instead of crawling into a cave and dying in it because I fucking refuse to go back down that road again. I’m so sick of not having control over my life again, so logically talking about it is going to solve that problem.
(I guess in a way I am sort of taking back the rein by talking about it, since that’s the decision only I get to make)
Lots of personal crap that’s been happening under the cut. This is really long (like, 2.5k), and you don’t have to read any of it. I’m just... unfurling and I didn’t want to relay this to any specific person since it puts them in an obligatory position to comfort me.
(also have some common sense as this is a very very personal post and I don’t want it spread around, no matter how much you relate to it. please.)
some background info:
a) As some of you know, I was technically out of school for a year, and not by choice (that’s a delicate way of saying I failed so badly that the school decided to intervene and give me a year off). The time off did many good things for me anyway, and looking back now, I definitely needed that. Getting back into school was a challenge for me however, and I worked my ass off during that year, stressing the whole time that I might not get good enough marks to be re-accepted. This all happened when I should’ve been doing my last year of school, so all my friends were graduating while I was working as a full part-timer.
I work at one of my school residence’s cafe. Naturally, I interacted with a lot of students, all of them in school and most of them doing what they love doing, getting coffee to accompany them in their lectures, and I watched them every single day for 5~7 hours. It was motivating in a way, but also devastating to stare at what I couldn’t have in the face every single day.
The condition for me was that if I get an cumulative avg of 70 or higher in two or more science elective courses, I’d be considered for re-acceptance. I know a cumulative 70 is easy for many, but after going from an 80 something avg to 50 something avg in two swooping semester and being unable to get back up on my feet for 3 consecutive years, plus everyone I know graduating and moving on with their lives, plus watching everyone else in school, plus being ashamed of myself for being such a failure, my confidence wasn’t exactly high and I had a really hard time getting things back together. Thankfully, struggles paid off and I got re-accepted.
b) there’s this thing that’s been going on with me since.... officially March, I guess, that’s been causing me and my family a lot of stress. The problem ended up involving court. First time, it didn’t solve anything, so there was another court date scheduled, which was the end of summer. I was so relieved that I was getting this over with before school started, because it was absolutely amazing how much it took over my life.
Other party didn’t show up because of legitimate personal reasons under law’s eyes, but they also didn’t bring forth a representative so court date was delayed to another date, which ended up sometime last week much to my dismay.
so, actual story of the past month or so:
I was doing really well during the first week of school. I was super fucking nervous about it, but I was so fucking proud of myself for how well I was doing, not falling behind and going to bed at a reasonable time every night, actually thinking about lecture materials again during my free time and actually enjoying what I learn instead of complete detachment towards everything about my life.
PMS hit me during the second week, and it was like, hormones please just fuck off so I can get my shit together please what are you doing, and after it left me I did get my shit back together on the following Monday, to my own surprise. Goes to show just how much that year off helped me, because me two years ago would’ve beat myself up for slacking off and struggle to get out of bed. Fuck, I was so fucking proud of myself for getting my shit back together again that day.
On Tuesday, just before I left for school, I’ve been told some things that relate back to the court thing (which was in less than a week at this point of the timeline), except it was brand new info that I definitely wasn’t prepared to hear.
I don’t know what happened, I guess I was too shocked so the severity of the situation didn’t really sink in until I was in my first class of the day, and I kept thinking about it over and over and over again until I ended up having a panic attack in the middle of class. Except, being the stubborn idiot that I am, I refused to leave and sat through the entire lecture shaking and almost in tears and short of breath, occasionally curling up into a ball in my chair and trying to just calm down during the last 45 min of it.
Panic attack continued after lecture, and I have a lecture right after this one, so I walked across campus while borderline crying and still shaking, clutching onto my anti-possession necklace like a lifeline and just trying to think about anything that wasn’t the court-related thing. I practically ran to the cafe beside the lecture hall after the lecture ended, and curled into a ball in one of the washroom stalls to calm down. All the motivational msgs written by other students in the stalls helped. (this is a student council-run cafe so they don’t erase the “graffiti”s like other public areas do)
I guess being so tense for so long and walking while being so tense surprised my muscles, and I ended up pulling my back. I know, I’m a fucking idiot, because why didn’t I just leave the lecture and calm down like a logical person. Because I worked so fucking hard to get this back, the lectures and being back in school, and part of me was so bitter about letting the court-thing take over my life so much, and I couldn’t let it take priority over school.
The whole week I hobbled around on campus and it fucking hurt like Satan was poking at my back every time I took one step, and I needed help getting out of bed during the first few days because the weight of my blankets actually caused so much pain that I couldn’t get back up. Told my parents and mostly everyone else that my back was hurting from the period cramp, though.
Anyway, the panic attack shook me up a lot. I tried to get back into things because midterms were starting the next week, the day after court actually, but all I did was think about the court-related thing and have more panic attacks throughout the week. Fun times. I got barely any studying done.
Actual court date, we were told to be there by 10 in the morning, but didn’t actually get to our case until 1 in the afternoon (so I ended up missing class), and it didn’t end until after 4. Better yet, we weren’t given the decision on the spot, and instead was told it’ll be mailed to us sometime in the course of next few weeks after they decide what to do with our case. We still don’t have the results by the way, so that’s still constantly on my mind.
That being the case, I had my first midterm the next day. Mammalian physiology, and I guess I was just... so mentally exhausted after 6 hours of being in a highly stressful environment, plus the past 8 months of overall stress, plus coming out of it without resolution so realistically not much has changed from my previous situation, that I barely trudged through the rest of the day trying to study. At this point I’m about 5 lectures behind every single course I’m taking which is like the equivalence of academic suicide in university, so I pulled an all nighter hoping that I’ll be able to retain something. Went into the midterm, turns out I focused on the wrong topics to retain. I’d be lucky (and if I had a very generous TA to mark it) if I got a 50 on this thing.
Coming out of the midterm, at this point I was having major flashbacks to how this exact fucking things used to happen during my past 3 years at school, and how that turned out for me. Safe to say that I was pretty low-spirited about everything.
Get home, later that night I find out my grandma in Korea might have lung cancer. I’m not very close with my grandma, but I am close with my mom, so this was more stress on top of everything. Of course, this wasn’t as stressful for me as my mom, who actually ended up in the ER in the middle of Wednesday night.
At this point: I’ve had multiple panic attacks that caused me back pains for days, the court case that’s been stressing me for almost a year wasn’t resolved despite its promise to be resolved, I’ve bombed my first midterm that I’ve written since officially coming back to school, I haven’t slept in over 30 hours, I’ve been working on a group paper due on Friday that I hadn’t contributed much to due to everything happening and felt terrible about, and I had to call an ambulance for the first time in my life and had to be the one to tell the nurses and doctors what happened over and over again and reliving the moment over and over again. After the nurses reassured me that she’s going to be okay, I got about an hour of sleep in, went to school until 2ish, then went back home to tend to my mom.
Honest to god, I thought I was going to lose my mom that night. She’s okay though, or at least she says she’s okay now, but she wasn’t okay until after Sunday (which was three days ago). Thankfully I’d booked my weekend off from work before because I’d planned on going to Torcon, so I was around to nurse her back to health.
This also meant that during my free time in between tending to my mom and doing all the chores around the house, I was either on tumblr trying to not cry, or crying. Because it’s still midterm season. And I have two midterms coming up later this week, back-to-back.
Then I forgot to give Sam (one of my dogs) her antibiotics on time on Monday (I was an hour late), and I just. Broke on the spot. Fucking sobbed and lamented about everything on the kitchen floor, and gave up because I was so fucking useless. Being sleep-deprived and not having eaten a single thing for 4 days other than one cup of hot chocolate and not having been outside since the Friday before while nursing a sick mom back to health probably helped with this breakdown, but.
I am just so fucking frustrated about fucking everything, because fuck I worked SO FUCKING HARD to get back into school. I was doing so fucking well not falling behind and actually keeping up with the material. Then all this happens, and I’m behind basically all the lectures after the first week, I still have no idea what’s happening with the court case, and I have midterms to write tomorrow, and I’m on the verge of giving up again. More than anything, I’m angry at myself for not being able to handle this, angry because I’m pretty sure I’m using all this as an excuse to explain how poorly I’m doing in school this year so far even though I should be able to handle this and trudge on, but I can’t because I’m so fucking weak and pathetic and I can’t even handle all this by myself like I should be able to and already giving up.
It’s like, what’s next? What am I going to use as an excuse next semester? Am I ever going to be able to do better? What’s the point of staying in school if I’m just going to repeat this over and over and over again, not being able to handle crap that life throws at me, because it’s not like shit like this doesn’t happen every fucking midterm season and I end up giving up for the semester.
But then I go to my lecture today after 5 days of being at home because Thanksgiving weekend plus my weekend off from work, and for the first time in weeks I didn’t doze off, and fuck. It fucking reminded me how much I love my profs this semester and how much they obviously love what they’re teaching, how much I love all my courses and how excited I was to learn all these cool stuff, and how, for once in my university career, how much I fucking love doing what I’m doing. Fuck, I talked to my prof after class because I was so fucking excited about being interested in lecture material again, and he got excited with me and it was fucking grand.
And. Just. I’m so fucking upset at myself, and so fucking disappointed for the failure of a midterm I’ll be writing tomorrow, and for being such a fucking failure yet again. I know I’m just wasting more precious time as I write all this down, but I think getting all this out of the system will help. Maybe I can pour it all out of my brain and onto this post, and stop thinking about all this shit for the next two days so I can focus on cramming.
I don’t want to give up. I’m so sick of giving up on myself. I finally actually got around to liking the major I’m in after wrestling with it for ~10 years after I was practically forced into the field (that’s another story for another day), and I honestly, earnestly want to do well in school. I just want a fucking quiet, peaceful life where I can just focus on school and not have unrelated emotional breakdowns every other day.
And even though I’m shaking as I publish this because this is such a personal post, I’ve finally... talked about it and laid it out bare for everyone to see. And I’m going to go now, and I’m going to study the shit out of stuff, in the hopes that I’ll actually pass my midterms.
edit: I’m okay now. A lot better after talking about it and putting it all out in the open, and talking with many people on here. Thank you for reading the whole thing if you have, apologies to the mobile users, and thank you for any worries you had for me while you read the post. <33 ;A;
