failure

Since I posted my last entry about cleaning out and getting rid of the easy stuff, I feel like my life has—both literally and metaphorically—gotten messier.

Due to totally-foreseen-but-not-always-preventable circumstances, I have been having trouble getting up and going to class. It hasn't (for once) caused me to fall behind in terms of classwork and learning, but it's still a massive pain in the ass when you have a teacher that takes attendance. I think professors can be very understanding when you're sick, but when it is in regards to a mental illness, it's much trickier. I don't want to have to go into detail about it, I don't even want to tell them the general diagnosis, so it's hard to even let them know what's going on; also, there's always the chance that you get a prof who kind of just doesn't view mental illness in the same way as physical illness, and that can be stressful. The last thing you want when you're trying to get caught up and scrambling to put the semester back together is to have a teacher who thinks that you don't deserve whatever leeway a "regular" illness would give you.

This is really difficult, and having to impose structure in my life as opposed to it happening by outside means (like how it did in high school) has been especially difficult. College has felt like nine years of grinding my insides against a cheese grater, and not even because the academic material is out of grasp; it's because the whole situation is just so unnatural to me, I have to fight my instincts every single minute of every single day. Obviously, I fail, and often.

I'm sure there are tons of other college students who are experiencing this, but it seems like I'm the only one, and therefore it is not valid.

On a different note, I got my shredder and fed it about 5000 papers, and yet my apartment has managed to look even messier than before. I'm so confused.

Much love.

—A