life is scary, and you're too tired to deal with it, but you have to.
Life is scary, and you’re too tired to deal with it, but you have to.
A short thing about school, life, being tired, and being scared of it all.
~
Do you ever get scared?
Scared of living?
So much that you don’t want to do it anymore?
Not suicide, because you like living, but you just…
Don’t want to live?
You don’t want to exist. You want to take a break.
Take a break and just do nothing.
You don’t even want to do the things that you want to do.
You just want to stay in bed under a pile of blankets with a book all day.
A day.
Or two, or three, or fifty.
However long it takes for you to stop being tired.
Constantly
Tired.
No matter how much you sleep, no matter how little you do, you’re just… tired.
You can just feel it. In the drag of your feet against the ground, in your 10th yawn of the hour, in the weight of your head against your hand. The tiredness that just won’t go away.
So you sleep in on the weekends. Wake up at 3 in the afternoon on Saturday, expecting to be fresh and new and wide awake.
Except
You’re not.
You’re just as tired as before. Maybe even more.
Because you’re dreading Monday. You’re dreading being tired again, even though you never stopped being tired in the first place. You’re dreading going back to school, where you’ll have to pretend that you’re not tired, because if you say you’re too tired to do something, you’ll be branded as lazy.
Lazy.
Because you’ve been overloaded with work. Because you’ve been up all night all week finishing everything just so you can do it all again the next day. Because you can’t take a break, you can’t skip a day, you can’t skip one thing, because if you do, it’ll just add onto your pile. And then, your grades will start to slip.
Don’t you think it’s funny?
How your whole life can be reduced to a set of grades?
To how well you can memorize some stuff and write it back down on a test?
And that’s how we determine a person’s intelligence.
You failed English? Stupid.
You didn’t pass math? Dunb!
You bombed history? What are you, retarded?
And all of this just builds up
Up and up and up
So that all you can focus on, all you can do, is study. Is work. Is hunch yourself over your desks and read until our brains rot out of our ears.
And if you don’t, if you decide to take a break and go out with our friends, you’re called a slacker.
Your grades are more important than anything else.
Than everything else.
And it’s pressure
Pressure, pressure, pressure
To do perfectly
To get straight As, to pass at the top of the class, to be better than everyone else, no matter what, no matter how close to the edge it brings you.
Even if it pushes you over the edge.
And even then, if you try to stop, try to ask for help, try to say “It’s too much—” You’re just being lazy.
Looking for attention.
Trying to cop out because you can’t handle it.
Wimp.
Don’t you think it’s funny, how we value our grades more than our mental health?
But that’s it.
That’s all there is. That’s all that we do. We judge a person’s smartness on their ability to follow orders. On their ability to finish things that they don’t want to do.
And if you do manage to do that—then what?
You graduate.
An honor.
And it’ll end then, right? You get to keep your cute little diploma, and life will be happy?
No.
An honor.
An honor that only lasts as long as it takes for you to go to college.
If you go to college.
If?
What if? There is no if. You have to go. If you don’t, you’re a failure.
You can’t get a job right after high school, oh no, that’s a dead end.
You have to go to college. It’s what you have to do. You graduate high school, go to college, learn how to do your dream job, graduate college, get your dream job, and that’s when you’re successful.
But…
What is your dream job?
How can you know what you want
To do
When you’ve spent your whole school life doing what you’re supposed
To do?
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I haven’t thought about it yet, I’ve been too busy writing this essay.”
‘Well, you’ll have to figure it out eventually.”
“Can I put off this essay then?”
“No! How else will you be able to do that thing that you don’t know you want to do?”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You don’t have time to worry about that, you’re running out of time to finish your essay.”
You’re running out of time.
Time.
Time until what?
Graduation?
Why does everything have to happen right after graduation?
Is this a race?
Don’t we get some time off? To stop being tired? Why don’t we all take a year and figure out what we really want to do?
No!
You can’t just skip a year!
Are you trying to work at McDonalds for the rest of your life?
Only the quick get what they want. Right out of high school, right into college. If you take a year off you might as well die now.
“Go to college, come on. Don’t be a deadbeat.”
“But I don’t know what I want to do—I don’t know what college to go to, what classes to take.”
“Well, you should know by now. You’ve had years! What have you been doing all this time?”
“I’ve had years, but I haven’t had time.”
“Failure.”
“Lazy.”
“Dead-end.”
Fine.
You’ll go to college. You’ll just pick something to study, so you can get some of your pride back.
And now you’re in college. Sitting in classes you don’t want to be in, learning stuff you don’t want to learn for a job you don’t want to do.
You graduate.
You’re $10,000 in debt.
You graduate and now you have another fancy diploma to go with the first one, except this one isn’t nearly as satisfying.
You graduate and you get all of this honor and praise and like last time.
But still, you don’t know what you want to do.
So now what?
Now you’re a failure again.
It seems
That
Unless you have your whole life planned out perfectly ahead of you
You’re a nobody.
You get some job at a grocery store because your diploma is useless in your city and you’re too much in debt to travel somewhere where it is useful.
If you can even find somewhere like that.
All that work, all those years, all that tiredness
Was useless.
Everything you’ve done
Is useless.
And you’re still
Tired.
You never stopped being tired.
Not when you graduated, not when you were in college, not when you got your job.
Never.
You want a break.
You need
A break.
But you can’t take a break because only failures take breaks. You can take a break when you retire.
But when will that be?
You make a living off of bagging eggs.
You can’t take a break now.
So when do you get to take a break?
You don’t.
Not until you’re too old to do what you really want to do.
And when that happens
You’ll sit there and think
All the way back
To when you were in high school
And you were scared
About life.
And you’ll be scared again
Because you’ll realize
That it all came true.
So what do you do?
Now, you, here in highschool now, about to graduate.
What do you do?
Do you take a break?
You can’t.
But you need to.
But you can’t.
But do you anyway?
When can you?
Now?
No.
After you graduate?
No.
When you retire?
Yeah, in however many years.
So when?
Is the only break we get when we die?
----------------------------------------------------
This describes me so much. I can not even put into words what I feel every single day and she just summed everything up.
Credits to : http://katrinawritesthings.tumblr.com/post/40586257658/life-is-scary-and-youre-too-tired-to-deal-with-it
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