Hi all. I know it's been a while but I really need a safe place to vent. Things were great, or at least manageable, but they aren't going so well all of a sudden. I feel like the world is crumbling down around me and I just want to disappear, go someplace new, start over fresh. I just want all of this mayhem to stop.

I'm finally on the right meds for depression that I can be happy and productive most days. My grades aren't great but I've improved where I could. But I'm still easily overwhelmed, everything makes me anxious, and I'm no more enthusiastic about my courses. I just hate this. I realized too late that I'm in the wrong degree, and the only choices I have are to quit or finish it. And I'm in my final semester so there's really no point in quitting. I'd hate myself if I quit. Plus I did apply for a master's degree in creative writing, my true love, which I'd jump into straight away if it weren't for this pesky undergraduate requirement. So even though I've realized what I really want to do and where I really want to be, I still have to finish this stupid degree in order to get there.

People keep telling me I can do it. They keep telling me it's only one more semester, just a few more months, but I can't hear it anymore. Every day I have to drag myself to class I feel something shrivelling up inside me. I keep trying to remind myself that I'm in the home stretch but it's just making me feel worse because "only five months" turns into "oh my god, a whole five months!"

My second semester hasn't started yet. I'm still writing exams from the first -- we write ours after Christmas, which is terrible because it makes this whole thing feel like it stretches on forever. The worst part is that for one of my courses, I somehow forgot to write the major essay. I'm not sure how that happened. I just had so much on my plate and then I got an email today from my prof asking why he hadn't received my essay. I feel TERRIBLE. I have no idea how I managed to screw up so phenomenally and I have no idea what I'm going to tell him, or how I'm even going to look him in the eye. He said I could discuss writing an essay with him but it would have to be on a different topic because he already returned the essays the rest of the class wrote, which is fair enough. I'm so humiliated. I just want to crawl into a hole and stay there until I graduate. Problem is, if I did that, I wouldn't graduate at all.

I'm a terrible student. I don't know why I'm here. I'm sure my prof is wondering what is going on and I really don't want to be lectured on any of this, which I'm afraid of if I go to see him. My attendance record is spotty at best so I'm sure he's going to bring that up as well. And because I'd been feeling marginally better, I haven't been keeping up with student support very often so they won't be able to back me up if I say that my lack of attendance and forgetfulness is due to mental illness. The agreement here is that if you need help, you ask for it, and they provide, but it's your responsibility to ask in the first place. I just ... didn't realize how desperately overwhelmed I was until now. I have no idea what to do, or where to begin to get things together again.

I thought I was doing better. I thought I had things under control. I just want out of this awful place once and for all!