There's still three weeks before I can go home. I have two essays and a translation due, plus two books to read ... I lied and told my family that I was doing fine. They think I handle things well, but I can't tell them that I feel like my life is spiralling out of control because when they worry it only reminds me of how screwed up things have become. I hate it when they check up on me, I hate it when they ask if I'm all right, and the better they think I'm doing the less they ask and the less ashamed I have to feel at how badly I keep messing up.

I just need things to stop for a little while. I just need to catch my breath and get myself organized and figure things out. But it's crunch time and I don't have time to get organized. At this point all I'm doing is running through as much work as I can, as quickly as I can, which isn't the best way to do it but if I don't get things finished the stress gets so bad that it triggers my depression even worse. I just need to get the next three weeks out of the way. I wish I could care about it more, I wish I could get myself REALLY in the game and really TRY but it's so much effort to even force myself to get through my work, I just don't have the energy to do it WELL on top of getting it done. I never live up to my expectations because I never put 100% into my work. I know what I'm capable of when I put my mind to it but it's like every time I try to really sink my teeth into what I'm doing, some kind of barrier goes up. My attention flies away and I can't focus and sometimes it'll take me an hour just to get through two lines of an essay. My counsellor keeps telling me that everybody is stressed but she doesn't understand that I don't care, it doesn't make ME feel any LESS stressed. It's like breaking your leg and being told "people break their legs all the time", like that's going to make it hurt any less. She says that the first semester of your third year tends to be the toughest on students but it doesn't matter, it doesn't make it any LESS tough on me to know it's tough for everyone else. It doesn't make it any easier to figure out how I'm even supposed to handle this. I go in to see her sometimes and I wonder what I'm doing there, why going over the same stuff all the time even matters. Talking it out doesn't seem to do me any good any more. I don't even know what my problems ARE half the time. At least last year I knew I had specific problems, with my family, my relationships, my future. Now that I've got those things sorted out, now that things are going better for me than they were, how come I feel so hollow? How come it's so hard for me to feel anything at all? The thought of getting through the next three weeks, much less the next year and a half, makes me feel physically sick. I just want to go to sleep and wake up when I graduate.