vickilicious

I can feel myself growing increasingly irritable and short-tempered with people who, by all rights, I should treat better than ever. I’m being passive-aggressive, cold-hearted, judgmental, and really quite unkind. I’m making hasty decisions that I know I will regret. I have abstract and amorphous thunderclouds of fury oppressing daily interactions, and at any moment I know I’m prone for lightning strikes.

This irrational, senseless anger is generally a ready indicator that something’s not right in Camp Vicki. It’s usually not until after I’ve acted hateful and burned a bunch of bridges that I recognize that my lashing out is almost always a direct mechanism related to frustration and disappointment with myself.

The constantly demoralizing experience of this chemistry class has not really taught me how to accept failure, but it’s gotten me acclimated to six weeks straight of feeling utterly stupid and incapable. Perhaps because I am now so used to sudden flashes of violent emotion devolving into self-loathing tears, I know this energy needs to be directed inward and addressed rather than stomped all over the rest of my life, so… I’m lashing in.

One way or another, this class ends on Monday. I have a finite amount of time to go through back homework assignments and prepare for a scary-ass comprehensive final. I’ll either perform well enough to pass the class, or not. And then, for now, it’s done. Monday afternoon, I can go swimming and sailing if I want, and all I have to worry about is work and thesis (and all my stupid personal drama) for the rest of the summer.

With that perspective in mind, I still keep falling apart. I realize that getting so emotional about something that really is just a question of mechanisms and points is fogging my ability to reason through things, and I’m certain that the constant sleep deprivation and stress is screwing with my ability to remember things. When I finished undergrad, I remember being stunned that I could suddenly read and retain information from books I read for pleasure. I cannot wait for this haze to lift, when everything in my life is relatively easy compared with those six weeks I lost my mind in organic chemistry.

I keep making blindingly stupid mistakes, flubbing up incredibly obvious things, and surprising even myself with my ability to completely forget material in the span of twelve hours. I’m just so tired of being this person whose brain doesn’t work, and the more upset I get about it, the worse it gets. I can feel higher-order thinking processes evaporating along with alkene reactions and rules of stereochemistry. I can see myself making increasingly foolish decisions in my personal life and doing reckless things with my heart - I can literally see my mind going, in everything I do, this hysterical domino effect that scatters across everything I touch.

I know I will laugh about this. Or beat myself up for a while because I failed miserably, have to retake the class, and eventually laugh about it. I’ll recall it in a bemused tone and smile knowingly when I see other people going through this experience. I just have to find the way from here to there and keep some semblance of my wits about me.

It probably doesn’t help that I cried the whole way home today.