On burnout, school, and seasonal sadness (vent)

baseballhater 11/15/2023 01:58 pm 267

It was good up until recently, I’d say. It’s never great, but to me ‘good’ holds the same weight as ‘amazing,’ so I didn’t complain. Although now it’s gotten cold outside again, and I think back to this time last year; sitting in a room with a bed, a door, a window with blinds on the outside, but nothing else. My stomach churns because I know I cannot go back there, and I won’t go back there because I’m better, I think. I go to school everyday, I maintain my grades in the 90’s, I get all my assignments in; but then it happens. I am buried under a pile of freshly fallen snow, unable to even open my eyes. Due to the snow—yes—but also due to this familiar fear that has taken over my brain.
It’s always November for some reason—before that it’s September—but something about the middle of a semester makes me turn off all the lights in my bedroom and listen to Jim Croce on the floor.
I miss another day of school and my mom tells me I have to go tomorrow. The next day I lie and say I have a stomachache. We both know this is a lie of course, but she lets it slide because I’m still a high performer even if I’m not the precision made machine she believed me to be when I was younger. I think back to when I was younger and remember how effortlessly I could balance living and thinking. I was a machine, basically.
I scored the highest literacy test results the school board had ever seen; they told me I could’ve been in a university English class when I was just 11 years old. Dear reader, this is not a brag, but rather a way to illustrate how the passage of time can change a mind. How instability can be hidden away under the ‘gifted’ label. I think that we should get rid of the gifted program, but I digress. The point is that that was then, this is now, and I suddenly have too many assignments that I’m able to do, but I cannot get them done.
Looking at an open tab seems to be all I’m able to do before I shut my laptop and go upstairs to participate in some form of what my brain tells me is sin. There’s nothing wrong with me per se, just persistent depression, but in a way that makes it worse. I want people to look at me and know that I don’t have the energy to do what they want. But I’m just a man. A man with two hands that are perfectly able to sculpt my future. But I don’t like that way of speech, so my hands stay by my sides.

I’m going back to bed, I hope my blanket warms me up, see you around in the spring.