By Lily Abells, TIWP Student

It’s all too much to deal with, this massive overload of stress—like what if I miss a due date or turn in my application to the wrong place or (oh god!) what if the file gets deleted and I have to start over?! I don’t know how I’d deal with that. I’d probably have a breakdown or move into the woods like Henry David Thoreau in Walden, except I don’t have any skills for living in the wilderness and would probably get eaten by a bear or at least starve and freeze to death. I mean, Thoreau was in Massachusetts for Pete’s sake (it’s cold as balls up there!) and why did we have to read that book anyway? It didn’t teach us anything and I didn’t even finish a full chapter, which is really sad because I used to read a lot. But now I barely have the time and when I do have the time, I don’t really have the motivation. It’s like school sucked the life out of me and left me an empty husk that knows how to do calculus—which isn’t what school should do at all. It should make you want to learn. And I do want to learn. I want to learn about anything and everything, and read every work by Shakespeare and learn every language. But instead I have to learn physics and worry about due dates in the hopes that maybe one application will be my ticket to learning, like actually learning what I want to learn, and god I really want that. But mostly, I just want to sleep.