Who'd've thought a poem could rule your life?

I hate this poem.

One night in the Easter holidays I was woken up with the first verse of this, and it has been haunting me ever since. The rhymes and structure are tenuous at best and the logical part of me is telling me to burn it, in the same way I do two-thirds of all my other poems, and forget it ever existed. However, I can't seem to shake it, so I'm hoping that publishing it will finally make my brain accept that it's finished and move on.

What is it you want from me,

Confirmation that your path was right?

Or do you just want me to give

My life for yours, that you might live?

Are your glasses that rosy,

Can you not remember your own plight?

You may have reached your tunnel's end,

Other wounds take longer to mend.

I had hoped that you would see,

The cost of asking for new insight.

Your passion and strength serve you well,

But some of us still live in hell.

And now, 'through a glass darkly',

You're looking with scorn upon my fight -

For all we are alike, we two,

I can't just drop what you outgrew.

Enough pressure, let me be:

My head is hurting, my chest is tight.

I needed an objective eye,

Not a lecture on 'do or die'.

I feel like a sapling tree,

Expected to grow in strength and height.

But some trees take longer to grow,

And are no worse for going slow.

I never wanted your pity,

I am aware that I sound uptight:

You misunderstood my question -

You judged me on your own fortune.

So now I'm feeling guilty

For looking to you who is so bright;

A role model I only bore,

Who kicks me down upon the floor.

I asked for help, finally -

Put my pride away, worked through the fright.

In different ways the battle's won,

And now I hold the smoking gun.

I'm losing all energy,

I'm sure it affords you great delight.

I kinda thought that you would know,

Old scars reap what new wounds sow.

Breaking Radio Silence

I will be posting again soon. I have a poem and some other stuff to share with people: some of it is a bit raw though, and I'm bogged down with revision/coursework at the minute, so watch this space - but not with bated breath because you might go blue...

This is me, getting a life.

I've decided that if I want to get out of this rut in my life, I need to take some affirmative action. So for starters I am making a list (in itself something I like to do) of things that I feel I should/would like to do sometime in the near future.

Doing more stuff that you like and trying new stuff is generally acknowledged to help improve the way people feel and although everyone knows that I am a neophobe, I've got to the stage where I'm willing to try anything.

Now, you may be asking why I'm bothering to post this, but I would like to ask you lovely people to take a look at the list and maybe suggest either things to add, or ways to do stuff that's on there.

Here goes:

Stuff I have let lapse and would like to start up again:

* Enjoy Maths

* Photographs

Take

Edit

* Poetry/Prose

Read

Write

* Recreational walks

* Origami/crafting

New Stuff I would like to try/do:

* Buy and watch Guys and Dolls

* Buy a CoolBoard (If staying at Uni)

* Start to enjoy Programming

* Get properly and catastrophically hammered

* Go Bowling

* Go Ice Skating (?)

* Dye Hair

* Henna Tattoos

* Go to the Gym more

* Lose some weight

* Listen to more music (New Stuff?)

* Eat better/more (New Stuff?)

* Learn to drive

* Write comic for Mark to draw

* Get more sleep

* Find a new hobby

This list is in no particular order, and I would really appreciate any suggestions for prioritising the list, adding new ideas, or psyching myself up to actually do some of this stuff! Thanks peeps, love ya all.

Panic

I'm having a panic attack, and the only way to try and keep it vaguely under control is to be writing something like this.

I would be doing coursework, but just looking at that seems to make it worse: I can feel my head burning as though someone had just poured a mixture of boiling oil and burning tar into every crevice in my brain and watched as it seeped it's way through all my synapses and seared away any pretence I had to intelligence.

So instead I'm doing what I started this blog for - using it to stave off the wave of hysteria by writing a post and letting my obsession for decent grammar and content flow and take over my head. Unfortunately, when I'm in a state like this, what my mind thinks is good content and grammar is different to what I would normally consider checks those boxes. So apologies to anyone reading this who is wondering why it doesn't seem to make much sense.

This is one of the worst panic attacks I've had in ages, and it is making me feel very ill indeed. I went to bed ridiculously early last night because I thought that if I could get to sleep it might not come. I didn't get to sleep. It did come, and it has lingered on into this morning. You don't want to know how long this post is taking to write, it's quite hard to type when you're shaking harder than the last Pope.

I've been trying to think of a way to describe the way that I'm feeling at the minute, but I can't get the words out. They've been taken in the flood which washed away my coherent thoughts of work and calm and forced itself out of my system in tears and sweat and phlegm and mucus.

This has not been a good first week of my countdown, and I am feeling more and more disillusioned with everything. I still wake up every morning and am still around to pray it might be otherwise every evening. I had hoped that this might not be the case and the the decision would have been taken out of my hands, but it was quite a vain hope I suppose.

Deadline

I am giving myself 5 weeks, starting Monday 18th Jan, to sort stuff out, particularly my grades. If nothing improves, I plan to quit Uni and end this chapter of a somewhat unfulfilled and unsatisfactory life.

I really don't want to do this, but it is important to be realistic; I have found that looking back, as pragmatically as possible, over the last two years, and assessing the pros and cons of remaining a student, the negative feelings and outcomes of my time at Uni are outweighing the positive ones. This is particularly true of the last 6 weeks, and I feel that setting out a deadline of 5 weeks is a sensible period of time in which to try and straighten things out before making any sort of decision.

I should point out that this is not one of the negative cycles that I find myself in on a semi-regular basis, and I am in fact being as objective as possible about this. I intend to keep some sort of record of how each day passes so that when it comes to making the decision I will have a decently sized continuous data set to consider, as well as the general view of things up to the start of this period.

The Clock's ticking, I hope very much that things will be better by the end of February.