stuck

i survived november and now i have to study

it is two days before my exam, and i am stuck.

it’s not the productive kind of stuck, not the kind where you just need a break or a better plan. i’m stuck in the way a body shuts down when it decides it simply can’t do this anymore. I have the material, i have the outline, i know exactly what i’m supposed to study. and yet, i cannot move. I just watch time pass through as though it is happening to someone else.

on november 13th, i was supposed to leave this world. I had a plan. I believed in it. I believed it would actually work, that everything would finally go quiet, but it did not. I stayed. that same day, i sat my ‘psychology of learning’ in class test (which i ended up getting a B on). as heavy as that day was, i remember staring at the grade once i received it and feeling absolutely nothing, then absolutely everything all at once. I was filled with shame. It was like i failed at dying but i also failed at succeeding, i don’t know.

now, it is two days prior to my psych of learning final exam. the same module. partly the same material. and a different version of the same fear, one that’s heavier, louder. I keep thinking about how strange it is that life keeps going even when you try to step out of it. how the world does not pause. how deadlines do not soften. how you are just expected to pick up exactly where you left off, as if nothing almost happened.

it feels like the world is closing in on me. like the walls are inching closer, quietly, patiently. like everything around me is reminding me of who i am. someone who never quite changes. someone who always gets close but not close enough. that thought of how i might remain like this forever terrifies me more than anything else. staying the same has always been my biggest fear. it shakes me to my core. it brings me to tears in the most humiliating way. the kind where you don’t even look sad, just small.

I need an A in this module to do well overall. I hate how much that sentence owns me. I despise how a letter can decide whether i feel worthy of existing that day. and again, i have the content ready, i could start right now. but that is the worst part. because i don’t start. and every minute i don’t, it just becomes further proof of my fears.

I tried talking about it, or at least i tried the version of talking that doesn’t scare people away, i hinted. I softened it. I told a friend i feel like i’m in the same place again, and she knows what happened. she knows the 13th is not just a date to me. but the conversation easily slid away. it suddenly became about her. her exhaustion, her stress, her life. and i listened, i gave her advice, i helped.

obviously i don’t blame her, i’ve spent years becoming someone people feel safe unloading into. I listen. I hold space. I respond carefully. I try to help whenever i can. being needed always feels safer than being seen.

and i know they care, but sometimes this care feels performative. like it only exists when i am useful, when i’m stable, or when i’m not asking for too much. and when i need it, it disappears. like i crossed a line i was never meant to cross. and that hurts me more than i know how to explain. it makes me wonder if my pain is too heavy, or too boring, or too inconvenient. like it’s easier to look away than to sit with it.

I ruminate constantly. I replay everything. conversations, mistakes, moments that felt small at the time but now feel enormous. to stay on topic, november 13th loops in my head like a warning i failed to take seriously enough. rumination makes me feel powerless. like my mind is not mine. one thought turns into ten, ten into a hundred, and so on until i am trapped inside a story where everything ends the same way.

I am scared again. and what scares me most is how familiar this fear feels. I have lived with heavy emotions before. I know how to carry them. but this time, I cannot seem to do anything at all. I cannot move forward, and I cannot rest. I am suspended in this awful in between where time keeps passing and I stay exactly where I am. it doesn’t feel dramatic, it feels dull. as though hope is slowly draining out of something that was already a void.

alone with all of these thoughts, i start wondering if maybe i’m sabotaging myself. if this is self handicapping. if i am freezing on purpose so i’d have something to blame later. something to point at when things go wrong. and that thought makes me feel sick. because it means I am both hurting and causing the hurt. It means I am participating in my own downfall. the loop tightens. I remember this feeling. I felt it back then. I ruminate. I shut down. I cannot get up. and yet, time passes anyway.

so who am i to complain when i’ve practically asked for this?

I don’t even know anymore, i’m just exhausted, overwhelmed, and stuck.