Chapter Ten: Falling Off The Other Side (~jinghan)

Being motivated and hardworking: it’s good, but there is also going too far and just burning yourself out. I forgot about the danger of this when I was trying to shake off my holiday-laziness. And then it all came crashing down.

It didn’t help that the weekend before I had said something stupidly mean to my friend. It was a fuzzy stupid feeling in my head, I was barely thinking about what I said before it came popping out. “Hey look I’m really tired, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. I think I really should go to bed. I’m really really sorry,” I type to her. But ‘sorry’ is just a word. Hot tears are rolling down my cheeks, by the time I turn off my computer. “Why the fuck did I just do that?” I scrawl furiously into my journal. I haven’t felt anything quite as close to self-hate as this for a long time. It scares me.

I calm myself down, and write a letter of apology to my friend. It’s 2am by the time I let myself sleep. I may have been stupid, but I’ve done the right thing, right?

Tuesday, I wake up with an ache in my head. My friend once told me “the morning is wiser than the evening,” something that has proven true on so many occasions after a night of stress and tears. But not this morning.

I was trying to get my work done the night before and I was trying hard, but most of it was not making sense. It wasn’t as if it was a particularly challenging topic, my head just felt like it was full of fuzz. I felt so stupid. I thought perhaps I would feel more clear-headed in the morning. But I wasn’t feeling it.

It didn’t help that I accidentally knocked my mini-shelf off the wall in the morning and my glass flower and ship-in-a-bottle smash against my bed-side-table. Perhaps the weaker person I used to be would have collapsed at this point, but instead I tell myself: “It’s okay it’s just stuff that has been sitting there collecting dust. Don’t let it ruin your day.” And true to my word I’ve forgotten about it by the time I’m at the train station.

I’m sitting in Probability trying to make what the lecturer is saying make sense. This is my easiest subject. I’ve scraped through all my other class work today – but deep down I know that I’m only fooling myself. I know that I don’t really understand any of this as fully as I could. I know that my high-school self could have picked all of this content up with out trouble. I know that I could have got a better score on my assignment that I got back this morning. Why is it such a struggle right now?

I lean over to ask my friend “wait I don’t get it, what did he do there?”

“Gee, your so loud. The people in front keep turning around and glaring.” My other friend teases. He’s just teasing, he doesn’t mean it, he spends all class distracting people himself; but my resilience was already broken. I say nothing in reply and dashed away a rogue tear that escaped.

“Don’t let small things like that get you down,” I tell myself. But after that the emotions were starting to leak all over the place and it was just impossible to understand anything the lecturer was saying.

No matter how hard I tried.

The feeling of stupidity and worthlessness was accumulating with every word the lecturer said. And all I could do was grit my teeth and hope that the lecture would end soon.

And then as I was getting up to leave at the end of the lecture my books all came sliding out of my bag. I could not help feeling the frustration and slamming my lecture notes in my hand to the ground, but in doing so I knocked all the things out of my pencil case. I tried stuffing things back into my bag so I could catch up with my friends who were already leaving, but for every one thing I put in something else would slide out. And kneeling on the floor between the lecture hall seats, surrounded by books and pens everything that I was trying to hold together all day finally cracked.

And I couldn’t stop the tears after that.

And as it is when you wish you were stronger and that you weren’t crying, in the middle of a lecture hall no less, I was sobbing and laughing all at the same time, and really had no idea what to do with myself. All I knew was that I was tired, and scared and I wished that everything would become easy and clear again.

My friends must have been surprised by the turn of events. They helped my bundle my books into my bag. Guided me me out of the lecture hall against the tide of people coming in for the next lecture. Sat me down on a warm sunny patch of grass, hugged me and let me cry without judgement until calmness faded back into existence.

For that I am so grateful.

“Promise me, that you will not study, and you will go to bed at 8pm, and that you will not read past 10pm,” my friend sticks out her pinky.

I pinky promise her.

And it makes everything seem like it will be okay, at least for today.

— —

Note from the author: I think I’ve reached my current miserable physical and mental and emotional condition because I’m so scared of failing my expectations of myself, working myself hard because I think that’ll make everything okay, trying to drown the feeling of missing my boyfriend… Don’t worry, I’ve been strictly ordered to look after myself, I’m leaving myself at least 10 hours for sleeping every night, I’m not doing any work that is not absolutely necessary. Every morning feels really bleak at the moment, like I might collapse on myself again at any point during the day, but my fears have so far been unrealised, and I’m usually pretty cheerful by the time I’ve been to a class and interacted with people. And after sleeping deliriously during the night and sometimes the afternoon too, I actually feel more clear headed. It’s a slow tentative recovery process, but things’ll be okay.