6/feb/2025, Thursday

“Since it is now past 2 AM, perhaps it’s time to get some sleep and tackle this tomorrow?”

Especially as a student, it seems necessary to sacrifice sleep in order to study for a test more or get that last homework assignment done, and I get it.

It’s a never-ending cycle— stay up late to study, too tired the next day, procrastinate because you’re tired…

I used to sleep around 8 hours, which is generally the norm, when I found that I was still procrastinating and still tired. I thought that this was due to stress and therefore needed to study more to reduce my stress about upcoming tests. This led to me sleeping 6-7 hours instead.

These past couple of weeks, I’ve decided to listen to my body a lot more, often sleeping 9-10 hours.

I’ve become more productive: being able to work towards my goals without losing out on my health, being more energized, and also having more free time.

It seems counterintuitive, right? Sleeping three hours more should reduce how much I get done in a day, but no. I realized I spend a lot of time while I study being off track or doomscrolling on my phone. This actually is a logical result of being tired— not having enough energy to focus on a task and needing the dopamine in a fast release.

So what do I do if I enjoy working late at night? Especially in high school, there’s strict schedules and timings for when you have to be up so that you can be on time. Unless you can get a prep period, you have to wake up at 7:00 am.

I started taking naps as soon as I get home. If I’m not feeling as if I’ll get anything done, I try to get off my phone and just listen to music or daydream as I try to get a little bit of sleep.

If I keep this up, hopefully Copilot will stop criticizing my sleep habits 😁

tonight’s setup 😊 hopefully I go to bed at a reasonable time. I still have TWO lab reports to finish though.

I thought my math homework was going to be chill because it was just two problems but tell me why I open it and it’s part a-p 😭

Rosette Nebula taken by Suzanne Beers on January 29 2024

The Rosette Nebula is part of the Milky Way Galaxy and is located 5,000 light years away from Earth. The Rosette Nebula is an emission nebula (not to be confused with planetary nebula).

These kinds of nebula are formed around massive, hot stars, whose ultraviolet radiation ionizes the surrounding gas. The excited atoms in the nebula also emit radiation, causing the nebula's glow.

The Rosette Nebula is also home to star forming regions, as observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. These are especially concentrated in the bottom of the nebula, although it is difficult to see in this image. Note that this photo uses the Hubble color palette.

academia moodboard

i actually got out of bed and did some work 😳 total 90 mins so far. next on my to-do list is emails and suddenly i want to crawl back into the darkness

Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse © © © ©

actually studying in the library for once 😊 and yes, i did spend five minutes drawing those gorgeous field lines instead of being productive

I know this is a long read but I believe this might help if you’re going through a burnout.

Last week I was so drained I couldn’t do anything. Let alone studying 11 hours a day as I planned, some days I couldn’t even pick up my pen and solve just one question.

Each day I said to myself “It will be better tomorrow. I will wake up and finish the things I need to do.” but every day proved to be worse than the other. My tutor was out of the city for a conference so I was on my own and needed to finish everything before he arrived. (I am a person who scolds herself if I don’t finish my tasks on time, even if sometimes my teachers don’t care, I do.) But I couldn’t finish most of them. Today is literally my last chance. I had to wake up at 5am and rarely take any breaks if I wanted to complete everything.

But I couldn’t. I woke up at 9, and just getting out of bed took all my energy. I went into the living room and fell asleep on the couch. For three hours, no matter how many times my mum tried to annoy me into waking up, I laid there without even once uttering a word.

And by my 1682597th dream, I had an epiphany.

This is my journey. This is me, working towards my own dream. People around me obviously care and feel for me, that’s why they worry when I fall behind. But if they had to give in the energy I give in each day, they couldn’t do it.

Because I wake up every day to my goals. Every morning I choose to keep going. Every second I am choosing to not give up on my dreams of becoming a successful person. I could easily change my mind any minute, choose another major, and I wouldn’t have to study as hard.

But I am not.

For 454 straight days, I woke up with this dream and there wasn’t a single day I didn’t want it. Not a single day where I said “Oh you know what, fuck it. I don’t want this.”

I had my days where I cried, screamed, even hit myself. I had my days where I was so exhausted that I kept looking at other majors I could get into but I never felt the same connection so I just stood up and kept working.

I am the one who might lose what I want, not others. I am the only one who is putting in the effort to make it happen because nobody else’s effort could make it possible for me.

So if I say “I did not have the energy for this.” they have to believe me.

If I am honestly EXHAUSTED, to a point where I don’t want to see my favorite pencil, it’s okay for me to fall behind a few weeks.

Now I will just get up. Once again. And do what I can. No rush, I have 145 days to go, and it’s better to actually learn the material than to have to come back to it later.

Keep trying. Even if it’s reading one sentence a day. Your dreams are yours for a reason.

RANT APPROACHING!!!! continue at your own risk ⚠️

OH MY GOD I CANNOT put into WORDS how UNEXPECTED this is. and your like… what? but an 87 isn’t even that bad???

look, i’ve been writing narrative and fiction since i could speak. i don’t normally ask for feedback, so maybe that’s a point of growth but oh well. i write multiple short stories every month and write a page of narrative in my journal EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

in school, we typically only write literary analysis or argumentative or like DBQ style. but i switched to a writing class this semester and my teacher told us to write a mock common app essay.

YOUD THINK that with ALL the narrative writing i’ve done and ALLL the summer program apps i’ve had to write in the past years, THIS WOULD BE A PIECE OF CAKE.

i will be honest, i did struggle with this a bit, but by the time we got to the peer review stage, my classmates jaws DROPPED and they were like ITS SO GOOD (not to be egotistic but just to give you some context for the level of writing i thought i had)

so IMAGINE MY FACE WHEN I SEE THIS. NO JOKE this is the LOWEST essay grade i’ve gotten in my ENTIRE academic career in the past EIGHT YEARS (i’m in high school btw)

and i loon at my class and im like no way im in the middle of the pack. like what about the kid who wrote about being a capitalist overlord in minecraft? or the basic one that talks about a sports injury??? and these are the people with brain cells. like what about the people that posted themselves buying alcohol for a party while they are underage onto insta??? like cmon no way their essays got perfect grades

and for reference she’s not that harsh a grader. my teacher is the most chill person. she hands out candy and actually got me to participate in class and doesn’t even care if you get your work done.

and so i check my document to see what feedback she left me. no joke the only comments are small grammar mistakes, some flow issues that she pointed out, and suggestions to elaborate. YOURE TELLING ME that the only thing wrong with my essay is that YOU WANTED MORE????? like make it make sense

worse thing is that i was planning to have her write my letter of recommendation, so at least i have an excuse to go talk to her??? but like i don’t want to be one of her B level writers

at one point the only thing i can imagine that was wrong with it was that it could be TOO creative or TOO emotional. so much for wanting to go outside the box and actually improve myself as a writer….

maybe i’m wrong but it feels kind of like an issue just with school in general. like maybe my school especially, since people are just obsessed with grades teachers expect the bare minimum, cookie cutter assignments. they don’t want you to expand on your thinking and it only matters if it’s going to be on test.

whatever. i’ll probably update the situation when i talk to my english teacher. thanks for listening to my minuscule problems 💕