the weight of everything i didn't do is suffocating me and it hurts
i don’t think i’ve ever been a bad student, not really. a procrastinator, yes, the kind who sits on the edge of deadlines until the last moment and then somehow still pulls through, the kind who always believed that even if i started late i’d still finish, that my brain would show up when i needed it to, that i could trust myself to deliver. and for a long time, that worked. i was never the one falling behind, never the one missing the mark. but then college started, and something shifted in me that i can’t even name properly, something broke in the way i used to trust myself. suddenly, i’m not just procrastinating, i’m… failing. i’m not just late, i’m absent.
i’ve been too negative, i think. too heavy in the way i look at things, dragging myself down before i’ve even tried. my performance has been trash, and not just in studies, but in everything i thought i loved-squash, where i used to feel like my body was sharp and alive; the clubs i joined with bright-eyed promises but barely attend; the commitments that i wanted to pour myself into but instead keep slipping away from. it’s like i can’t commit to myself anymore, can’t commit to showing up for the person i thought i was going to be.
and i have this voice-god, i know it’s beautiful, people have told me so, i’ve felt it when i sang, like something inside me was finally free-and now it’s just rusting away. i don’t even sing anymore. my ukulele, the one i once carried everywhere, is lying in the corner like an abandoned instrument from a war nobody remembers, gathering dust, its silence heavier than its sound ever was.
and maybe the worst part is how the state of my mind has started spilling out into my room. my room used to be my place, mine, a reflection of me in the best way. now it’s just untidy, cluttered, like i keep throwing things around because i can’t bear to sit with myself long enough to put them back. it looks like i’m always mid-collapse, like the room is telling on me, showing what i can’t say out loud: that i am unraveling.
sometimes i wonder when i stopped being me. or maybe i wonder if this is me now, if the girl who used to get it done, no matter how late she started, is gone for good. i hope not. i don’t want her to be.
