some depressive ramble

apparently a-levels are meant to be hardest time of anyone's educational life. it feels that way too.

(minor lesson for all those non british people reading this: after the age of sixteen, you can quit school completely or continue on to sixth form, where the most popular courses are 'a-levels.' you spend two years learning on average three subjects and also usually spend a year learning something else at the same time. then after those two years it's normal to start university at the age of eighteen)

maybe i am insane to take four a-levels. there's less than a handful of us taking more than the three and a half courses everyone else seems to take; in our sixth form. i always planned, well, when i started a-level art, i planned to drop it after a year and concentrate on my other subjects. yet i couldn't do that. i can't drop a subject halfway through discovering it, even if the system is designed for me to do that.
the pressure seems to be getting to me, i never seem to have any time. yet whenever i get any spare time i waste it. i guess with the extra free time i would get if i wasn't doing art i would waste, at least i should get a certificate out of it.
i just wish the pressure would drop. i go back to school in three days after the holiday season and enter a month of exams. thirteen examinations for me to toil in. a five hour art retake in a vain attempt to improve my grade. i personally doubt i will be able to modify my expression in a way that some random examiner can interpret and hence give me a grade based on my attainment in such a subjective skill.

i should be frantically revising, but i physically have difficulty revising. i seem to have luck, and the ability to pull top grades with little effort, or so it seems from my perspective. so i neglect to do any revision and perform the normal denial "i'll do it later." with less than seventy two hours until i have to prove myself at a thin slab of former tree, i seem calm and collective to all those around me. yet inside i am breaking apart.

i never seem stressed, yet inside i become ill and fail to realise what my actions seem to be observed as. what with the conflicting views inside my head, and the endless repetition of "you're nearly there" being echoed throughout every room of my habitat, i don't know what to do.

then i come back to my computer and live a lie. i act like i'm nearly afraid to act in real life™. i spend my time absorbing information, browsing forum after forum - absorbing content yet not uploading. with this information i seem to conjure up strange and mythical plans and ideas to improve this world and to satisfy my exploration of graphics, yet very little of what i visualize finds itself as data on my hard disk or as a scrawling in a pad. when i talk to others or communicate i always ask the question, "does this person need to know the statements i am about to present?" content seems a one-way direction for me.

yet here i am rambling on about my stress and the fact that i hardly submit anything into a random file that will fall between the platters of the gigabytes of media i have created on this machine. it seems my conscience will let me do anything provided it isn't revision, something i feel i need yet will not do. i seem to leech from this world and not bother to do share the information i absorb, and when presented with a exam in which i am told to write what i know, i merely write the narrow field of what has been instructed by the examination board for me to learn.

with this stress and worry comes a tinge of depression. to be honest with myself, you know the period in your life, when you're just beyond the start of puberty and your emotions are in a complete mess and the defragmentation process of your brain starts. the suicidal depression then that many face occurred to me also. thankfully something happened in my family at that time which made me decide to say to myself, "i'll live because of that." the problem is, as i return to this underlying depression, that something has diminished and become insignificant, so the original saying to myself becomes invalid and i therefore have little or no will to live. i am merely an inefficient machine that continue to deplete resources from this planet and withhold the pain and depression that would occur to those close and far from me if i was to terminate my existence. before you start to worry, i am not suicidal. i am merely seeking for some meaning in my life other than the usually route of the system - school, university, training, job, marriage, reproduction, dribble in a nursing home, die.

some find that meaning in religion. i don't. i see religion as a system that bonds society into acceptance of their existence. while i am not against this system, i do not wish to be part of it, or for that matter any system. i want to be free of this maze of insanity which clouds my conscience. i want to get out of this organic shell and think. i don't really know how to continue.

by keot, posted on Friday, 02. January 2004 @ 0102.30 gmt