WARNING: Another miserable rant coming up

When I was a child, I believed that I was a moderately intelligent, relatively hard-working person, and that when I grew up I could pretty much be whatever I wanted to be. It turns out I was being supremely and unjustifiably arrogant, and for starters I feel I should apologise to the people I was at school with for all the times I was inexcusably patronising to you.

I don't know if any of you know what it's like to spend years labouring under a misaprehension, but if you do, you will appreciate that when the truth hits you, it hits hard and is a fairly devasting blow.

These last few years have been eye-opening to me, and have shown the true extent (or more precisely the lack thereof) of my mental powers. My A-levels and first year of University were a disaster, and I think this marked the beginning of the end of my academic career. I have been reluctant to accept this, as I have always felt that academia was my purpose in life: my school work and the absorbtion of new knowledge were, to me, the most important things in the world. However, now, as I reach the conclusion of the first week of exams, I am forced to the recognition that I am actually not as good at education as I have been thinking all my life.

Last year I faced my first major failure, and this year saw me retake 6 of the 8 first-year EngMath units. I really thought I'd done enough this year, I thought my work-rate had picked up again, and that I had a chance. Unfortunately, when it came to revision-time and I started going over my notes & doing past papers, I discovered that I couldn't answer any questions. I have worked myself into exhaustion over the last few months, and now it seems that all of that meant absolutely nothing. In these exams, the pass rate is a measly 40%, and yet out of the 5 exams I have taken this week, I found, by the end of 2 of them, I had not written enough that even had everything been correct (which I know is not the case), I cannot possibly have passed them.

This seemed to me pretty conclusive as evidence that I shan't be continuing my studies much longer, and I don't mind admitting that this realisation was the most shattering of my life. I cannot imagine doing anything other than study, and although I knew I would, at some point, have to venture beyond into the world of work, I never, ever, imagined that it would come so soon, nor that my time at University would be such a catastrophic failure leading to my incredibly low employability (having no practical experience or decent qualifications).

Obviously, as my family keeps telling me, I don't actually know until the results come out on 19th June, but I'm afraid I don't think I'll be in Bristol much longer. While I'm fairly certain no one will bother reading this far down this post or care what happens, I will probably still post my results on here as and when I know them, but until then, if anybody can think of any jobs going that an unexperienced, unqualified young person with mental health problems could do, please let me know.

Disillusionments

Heed my warning folks, insomnia and a lack of home internet is not an aid to revision.

It is distracting and unhelpful for concentration, hence I am posting here and not thrilled about my progress in the studying area. My head is spinning, and feels as though it's full of soggy cotton wool, so if anybody has any motivational ideas or morale/health boosting suggestions, I'd be grateful.

Thanks peeps.

Oh it's you, of course I remember you ... um

Wow, it's been a while hasn't it?

The long absence doesn't appear to have made my heart grow fonder: I seem to still be as obnocious as I've always been, and although I don't have anything particularly interesting or eloquent to say, it's entirely possible that this rant will last far too long. In fact I think it probably has already if I'm honest, so I'll stop soon.

I think it's fair to say that I have some venting to do, but hopefully next time around I'll try and add something more positive as well; I am meeting a very dear friend on Saturday, which should be fun, and maybe I'll attempt to rustle up a poem as a reward for the few masochists left who are reading (please, stop torturing yourself, there's the whole internet out there, you don't have to be wallowing here with me).

Explanation

My brother asked me the other day why I hadn't done a blog post in so long.

The short answer is I've had nothing to say.

The longer answer is that I've felt like shit and had nothing to say.

Sorry.

It's nearly over

Warning; this post is mostly (entirely) a rant; rhetoric spiralling into near-despair. I will try to make the next post better-possibly with another poem.

Right, tomorrow is the start of week 8 in the University calender. There are 10 weeks in the term leading up to Christmas, which means I've only got 3 weeks to go.

I'm having mixed feelings about this and many things at present. I'm getting used to Uni, the panic attacks are less frequent, but at the same time, I still have no energy/inclination to do work outside of lectures, and this is getting frustrating, because I want to do this properly, but there's another part of me that just switches off when I start work, and it's hard to do what I have to do when half your thoughts are somewhere else.

Also not helping is the fact that the only coursework I have to do this year is Electronics which involves 3 hours of lab time every Tuesday afternoon for 4 weeks, starting last Tuesday. This would not be so bad apart from the fact that I have a few problems with electronics:

1. The lecturers are boring;
2. The lecture contents are confusing;
3. The confusing contents are complemented by badly written lecture handouts and poorly presented lectures;
4. There is no incentive to try and get over such obstacles to find the heart of the subject as this too is incredibly boring and comes across as not worth the effort.

I went to the first lab, and found that as I had suspected might happen, I had no idea what I was doing. Looking for something positive I noticed that apparently almost no one else had any idea either, so at least we were all in the same, somewhat waterlogged, boat. The lecturer of course was no help; any question that was asked would be answered in the patronising and slightly annoyed tone that implies the answerer is convinced of it's obviousness and the fact that everyone who isn't a congenital idiot has done it before and should therefore be fully conversant in the details.

Needless to say, it was one of the worst 3 hours of my life, I left with no more idea than I had gone in with and feeling rather worse than a bug which has been squashed under a boot which had not long previously stepped in some fresh fox excrement. And, joy of joys, I have 3 more weeks of this to come.

This and other events this week which I cannot so specifically lay my finger on, have left me swinging wildly between feeling okay and so black that pitch shines as a beakon of lightness before being totally swallowed in the depth of my unhappiness.

Although so far I have been able to act/react pretty normally when in conversation, particularly with my parents, my sleep which has never been good is now at a stage where I can either get absolutely no sleep or my body relents and I sleep very deeply at all the wrong times and for too long. I'm also starting to feel, as I mentioned, mixed feelings with regards to the end of term: I'm happy because of the holidays and the end of the labs, and I'm looking forward to Christmas; but at the same time, I'm worried, among other things, about how my change of schedule will affect my already pretty rubbish health/sleep patterns, and how I will be able to make use of the holiday which will be my best chance to consolidate what I've done this term and actually make sure that I know all I need to know about this term's stuff before we start learning more new things next term and I have to start again. Those and other worries which I can't quite work out how to articulate are all pretty banal and irrational, but they are what they are, and I can't shake them.

Right now, I really wish I was in bed, or working, but while being to tired to concentrate on work, I'm not tired enough to sleep. So I'm doing this: hardly productive and sounding pretty pathetic, leading me to decide that I'm going to stop, give up, and go to bed anyway. At least it'll be warm in there.