This semester has gone so badly and there is still a big chance I could fail everything as I have one or two significant assignments/exams to go for each. I'm so close to the finish line, I've put so much.. not so much effort as stamina into this semester. The entire time I've been crawling on hands and knees, making my fevered, foggy brain concentrate and scraping through every task, every test, every social interaction.
Firstly there was China. The most amazing experience which I have failed to write about yet. It taught me to see the world as beautiful again and when I got back my perceptions were opened up and I found it difficult to shut off the influx of sensory data. Colours looked brighter, the distant crosings down the streets were no longer background but crawled to life with pedestrians and dogs and cars, walking down rundle mall changed from navigating my way through to noticing everyone's facial expressions. At first I appreciated this, I could look at things and just love how this colour juxtaposed with that one, how that couple's argument was cute and funny, but soon it became hard to look up without there being 20 or more things for my brain to process, sitting in cafe's became hard as one conversation nearby would be layered by another one the next table over, and then everyone in the cafes, murmuring and chinking spoons on cups, the traffic outside, and the coffee machine hissing and churning out freshly ground coffee and chairs scraping and the sounds would keep building up until it felt like screaming.
And of course after a high of travel there is always a low of once again being stationary. This low was harder to deal with because everyone just put it under the 'post-travel-blues' category and it wasn't that at all. I was deeply sad because I knew that my new perceptiveness and outlook on life wouldn't last and even though it became a burden, I anticipated and mourned its inevitable loss.
There was another aspect of China that impacted my return significantly which was around the theme of boys. It wasn't a crush so much as a genuine experience of what being in a relationship (as travel buddies make a lot of codependent decisions) felt like. But I will go into that another time.
The next two significant things that happened this semester was my leaving home and my getting the implenon. Moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do to your body and brain. The implenon is significant in all the rumours or scientific research into their suicidal side effects.
I haven't been so suicidal since Courtney and Josh refused to break up for me. I felt so empty and un ambitious, I no longer desired things for my life, I resented Josh for all the things he did to me and got super bitter about no one loving me, and became completely hopeless that anyone would ever love me. Study was no longer something I found self worth in and it wasn't that I wanted to die, but I started to see my death as something unavoidable, even telling my mum that I wasn't sure if i'd make it til christams. This made studying extremely difficult, because not only was I super fatigued all the time and had very little brain capacity for completing tasks, I had absoloutely no desire to do anything to better my future. My Canadian ex, with whom I remain friends helped me a lot through this time, my calm strong voice that I lay my head to rest on and that comforted me and kept me here. One day my mum prayed for me and the severe depression went away - I felt ambitious again and from then on it was only mild depression and bad anxiety that I had to deal with, like normal.
But it was already pretty far along in the semester. I missed a week at the start of term with China, and the depression knocked me out for about 4 weeks (I still attended but barely did any assignment work) so I was very far behind. Being so stressed and so sad for some reason meant that my body could not handle illness and I had a cold for most of the first half of semester, tonsilitus twice and the last two weeks of term I contracted some sort of flu which made me miss a few classes and then downed me for a week (the week that I had set aside to do all of my assignments.)
I'm not a very organised student at the best of times, but contracting an illness in the last minute stages of assignment due dates means I'm an even worse student. This whole semester just hasn't been fair. And I've lost the capacity to concentrate for long periods of time. Everything exhausts me and I just don't really feel like doing any of my work. My future is so shaky, I have no idea what I'd like to do and if I do want to do further study I have a lot of work ahead of me and its so uncertain that that is really my path. Thinking about my future and being ambitious used to pull me through, but I've grown so bitter about everything its hard to see anything positively.
So here we are, two days before my french exam, for which I have not begun to study, three assignments due or overdue (two of which I have not started) and one more exam for the weekend ahead, which I have at least read the books for. I don't know if I'm screwed. I might not be, everything might be ok. But I don't know.
I keep telling myself over and over it's not too late, you can do it, its ok, all is not lost, there's nothing to lose. The first steps are to write out sentence by sentence my research essay. Can I do that? Is it Ok? Is all really not lost?
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