the semester from hell

02 Sep, 2026

last modified 8 hours, 39 minutes ago

I wrote this whiny soliloquy on the last day of july. I'm not sure when it will see the light, if ever, but we're at the start of september and I felt like giving it another go. So off it goes into the wild blue yonder.

This post is about depression and being childish and feeling stuck in childhood. It’s also quite long and personal. I want to say these words, but you needn’t hear them. It’s mostly composed of a whole lot of prettied-up complaining, anyway…

Where should one begin to describe the Semester from Hell? The Hell Semester? The four months of dragging myself to be executed daily, screwing around with my phone in class because getting out of my house cost me so much energy I’ve got nothing left for the psychic damage of remembering I’m out in public, the bitter cold wind and the subway oven heatstroke, the four hours straight with no breaks of compound words? The lowered medication dosage, if at all?

This strange thing happens to me. I feel this shame like, if I lay out what materially happened, it’ll turn out to be nothing. Like it was a mountain I made out of a molehill, like I’m an irrational, illogical, random actor in my own life and, for some reason, this merits punishment. Oh, I of little faith: I was regularly expected to leave the house for twelve hours in a row — which may not seem like much, but it was a revelation just last year to spend six.

I don’t owe the internet an explanation for any absences, though. Nobody gives a shit — and if I must draft a post for every time I go M.I.A., I will rapidly fill my blog with those posts, like clockwork, every three months. Would you read a blog that updates every three months with apologies and me putting myself down and nothing else but winter air?

I’m a lot funnier and more likeable when I’m confident, even if I’m just putting on airs, so: nope. Not my fault. You would’ve buckled too. It was the Semester From Hell. And I killed it.

I did kill it. That’s what I’ll say I did. I poisoned it over several weeks and now it’s dead. It was a dragon and I slayed it — and nobody, well, anybody can tell me otherwise. When writing about things I’m sensitive about, I find it hard to thread the needle of the self-doubt Scylla on one hand and the dishonesty Charybdis on the other. We toil on anyways.

I got fucking ghosted, did I tell you guys this? Went on a date. First date of my life, if you were curious, got set up with a cute friend of a friend of a friend. She told me over text she liked Percy Jackson, so I bought her a keychain. Forgot to give it to her on the date. Then I got ghosted! Post-date! I’ve done my fair share of ghosting, man — I’m not mad — I just wish I could’ve passed on the keychain. Probably for the best, I wasn’t feeling the spark anyways, but it smarts. The keychain smarts! I have a real strict budget!

You know, my mom’s been getting into greek mythology lately? Not directly prompted by the movie—Nolan’s Odyssey just came out, for future historians—but I wouldn’t put her algorythm past being influenced. She says she’s been preparing to read the Odyssey, and maybe the Iliad and even the Aeneid too—which is roman but shares a lineage—and I got to tell her about the said lineage, and how the chain of inspiration continued through Dante Alighieri, according to my trusty friend and spouse, Wikipedia. Though I only found this out as I was looking stuff up about my gacha game of choice.

(I’m writing this post on my phone as I walk down the street, so here’s a shout-out to the extremely stylish grandmother I’ve just seen in a floor-length green trenchcoat. So chic! Being old makes everything twice as chic! Grey haired and retired and divorced or even widowed. Doesn’t it? One last moment of glory, before time reasserts itself?)

The gacha’s going good, by the way, not that I think bearblog cares much—it’s easy to say you’ll never play one, then think well, it’s fine if I don’t pay for it, then you start wondering about spending on the battlepass—luckily, I’m too poor to think about that; F.O.M.O. is my destiny. Ode to joyyyyy. But the gacha, I mean, it’s going, I’m trying to grind up the shards for Valencina Rodya before mid-september rolls in and Canto X rolls out. (I told my mom a bit ago about how this gacha has a character based on Albert Camus’s L’etranger, a book she’d read a long time ago. She found this information precisely neat, neither life-altering nor worthless. I should read it someday too, at some point… I mean to do it, it’s just, bleh.)

(I’ve sat down at a café and a man has just ordered a sandwich and a full bottle of beer. It’s like, a Starbucks-type place. It’s 4 PM on the dot! You couldn’t wait one hour for the bars to open?)

(Across the street, there’s a convenience store that advertises flavors of Monster Energy I’ve never tried. I miss Monster Energy! Maybe now that I’m on a lower dosage of my medication I’ll be able to have them again). (It’s not that I can’t, it’s more like I shouldn’t. Uppers and uppers and uppers makes a heart go ka-blooey!)

Well, I got ghosted, so that’s part of the post-mortem—the medication is, too. After a false cardiac alarm in february, I was unmedicated in march—and going through a round of medical tests that kept me from paying attention to when classes started, where, and at what hour—and I spent april playing catch-up—and by may I was dead on my feet, and there was no salvaging the situation.

Oh, and the hours. Class in the morning and in the evening twice a week, nothing in-between, just wide enough of a gap that the benefits of going home to eat and sleep were outweighted by the negatives. Twelve hour days for a bitch with the Learned Helplessness-type Depression. Nightmare realm. Nightmare realm. I specifically specified I did not want to do med student hours! Dear lord! Merlin’s beard!

What else is there to complain about? Not much in the semester itself, except my own performance. I got distracted at some point and by the time I could lock back in, it was too late. It got too dark too quickly and I lost the plot. That is, read, translate to: I was using my phone in class. Again. Not loudly, I was quiet as a mouse and breaching the surface when I could to jot down stuff—but… I don’t know. Okay.

I’ve been doing this since highschool, earlier if you count its first iteration—falling asleep in class—and I still struggle, after a decade, to explain what I’m doing. Without using passive language, this-happens-to-me, because there’s an active choice, I just don’t know quite what motivates me. The first bulletpoint is: I hate being in a class. I hate classes. I don’t know what trauma I have with them, but I know it’s traumatic, because I react like it’s traumatic. Part of that reaction: dissociating. Being not-there. Maybe dissociating is a strong word—it’s not clinical, I’m not saying it seriously, I’m borrowing the term from its rightful owners, shoutout systems and their comrades—but it’s the word that’s used for being-not-there and so I’ll sub in whatever the right word is for this one. Does this blog get one trauma-dump each winter? At least they’re effortposts. Half-effortposts, if nothing else. Follow for more.

I don’t want to be there. I want to be elsewhere. In may, (in class), I spent a lot of time reading a particular text Let’s Play, which I’m rereading right now for… probably closure? You should read it too. It’s good for the soul. Especially if you like SCP or Zero Escape, but mostly if you like a certain brand of plotty fanfictions For Him. I do! Shamelessly and unabatedly. They’re fun! They’re accessible! What’s so wrong with this…? And ask no questions about the relationship between the Let’s Play and the gacha. That way you won’t need answers.

See what I mean? Being not-there. I don’t want to talk about the upsetting thing: I want to talk about my escape rope. There once was a sinner so horribly evil, his only redeemable act was to show mercy to a spider: when he went to hell, his only avenue of salvation was to climb up a spider’s thread, until his egoism caused it to snap. Saved you the SparkNotes on an Akutagawa, don’t thank me. (Thank the gacha). I don’t want to snap my spider’s thread, even if it means escaping hell, even if it’ll just dissolve eventually and I’ll need to find a new one, a new distraction once I’ve sucked the joy out of the previous. (The wheel has a nave and a felly and ten thousand spokes and is perfect in every way¹). I treasure the thread a little too much. I hoard it for later. Then the thousand years of torment are up, my karma is purified, and I never stood up to grasp salvation: I just let it come to me. It feels undeserved! But it hurts more to fall back into a state of suffering than to never have left it in the first place. Easiest cheat-code to Nirvana ever found: just don’t let yourself desire, fivehead! Another W for ascetism!

So, a post-postmortem on the phone thing. Why do I leave class? I mean, no duh: because I don’t want to be there. Why do I not want to be there, though? Unknown. Beyond science. What few memories of it I have are a sparking fence (it hurts when I touch) — I have images of teachers laughing at me, through no fault of their own, because I’ve been funny forever. But mostly it was this silent white pressure. I don’t know where it came from. It seized me wholly. Did anything ever cause it? Or was I just eight-years-old and imagined something horrible, and then I took the idea too seriously?

…Was it just the GODDAMN GENDER DYSPHORIA AGAIN, OH MY GOD—?!

[TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES - PLEASE REMAIN CALM AND EXERCISE PATIENCE]

I was very scared, mind you, of failure. But as I chew on it, I realize the fear of academic failure wasn’t what started it. Something shut me down, and when I woke up, I realized they were mad at me and freaked out. (Who are ‘they’? Do not ars’k). But why is it classes that do it for me? Is it that I’ve got nowhere else to be but my own head? Because if I’m talking or writing, I’m so busy wearing my mask that I can hardly hear others. It’s a legitimate impairment on my ability to hold a conversation. I need to be less witty because it makes me worse. But well, okay—is that it? Is that what got me?

I guess I won’t know until I go on hormones….Damn it, I gotta’ stop kicking that can down the road. I also struggle with walking places undistracted—generally, with being in the moment—which corroborates.

The cycle isn’t unending, though. See, this semester… I felt regret. I bitched about my classes, but I liked them. I hate having done poorly on them. I didn’t feel regret before. I guess that’s what finally motivated me to write this, to get to the bottom of it. For once in my life, I wished I hadn’t gotten it wrong.

“This… This is new. There’s a lot of new this go around. Hopefully, it’s the kind of new that gets me what I’m after.” ²

I mentioned this earlier: my mom told me she had gotten into greek mythology recently. She’s been listening to a podcast on the subject, as a bit of an introduction. I begrudge no one the need for a ramp into stories several thousands years old, so I nodded along. She said the podcast had recommended a book series as introductory material—“Guess which one”, she asked, with some sense of excitement. I said Percy Jackson, and I was right. “The one you read when you were a kid,” she told me, and then, as if revelatory: “is that where you got all your knowledge of greek myths?”

I half-heartedly nodded, because it was quicker than explaining the truth. I'd been reading loose greek myths since way before I read Percy Jackson—and I read Percy Jackson very young. My family had thin little paperbacks of compiled greek myths and I tore through them basically as soon as I learned how to read. That’s what I was doing in first grade. Riordan didn’t get me until second. I sincerely didn’t know—still forget—that the basic pantheon wasn’t common knowledge, that most people had no clue who Scylla and Charybdis were before Anno Domini 2026. Do they even show up in the movie? I haven’t gone to see it. I like better the way I imagined Ulysses when I was six.

(It’s not that I’m flexing some snobby sense of hipster cred. I mean, I might be doing that—by definition—but my primary aim is to say something true. The fact that the truth affirms my hipster cred is sweet, and I can’t definitely say I’d speak it if it meant embarrassment on a public forum. But if people don’t say true things just because the truth sounds like bragging, you quickly end up in a cloying society ruled by white lies that only get worse and worse and worse. This is known!)

And it’s funny, because I went back last year to Riordan, out of curiosity, and I bounced off — hard. Reading him now felt demeaning — clothing that shrunk — I’d outgrown him, which felt like a new sensation. Back when I was texting with my once-date, when she said she loved Percy Jackson, there was a mean part of me that had to bite back the words At your big age? — it’s true. See: I don’t blame her for ghosting! I’m a very ghostable guy! I think dickish things and try not to say them. I’ve been thinking that, if I try a dating app, I should probably request only opinionated assholes apply. I wanna try getting my energy matched.

But today, while I was fishing in my memory for the cause of my current problems, I remembered a feeling. I was seven or eight, reading Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, books like those, and I… didn’t like them all that much. I read and re-read them, but I remember… vaguely, faintly, I think I remember it. Feeling condescended-to. Not so much with Percy Jackson at first, but with the sequel series, the spinoffs, I started feeling frustration. It wasn’t as personal, as immediate, as urgent. I found the cast to be strangers. I disliked it. So maybe it’s been here all along, another thing I’ve been ignoring for twelve years, now unpacked.

There was a long while where I stopped reading. Part of it was that I’d gotten my first smartphone and rediscovered the internet, but I also… felt like everything I found on bookstores was inaccessible or sucked. Later I found my way back, but in the dark, and I still teeter — I’ve read way less this year. Maybe that’s a sign. I’m happier when I’ve got a book in my pocket.

I don’t know. I have this sensation like people are ahead of me in action and behind me in thought, which is frustrating to navigate. I have no idea how to think less. The idea of doing, as I am, in this shitty body and shitty face I don’t like, in this squeaky voice, in this long hair because short hair doesn’t suit me… you’d feel sick too! So I guess that’s the cyanide that did the corpse in, before the post-mortem lacerations, the gunshot and the stab wound. Mystery solved. Management will do nothing about it. You can only watch.

Everyone goes through this at my age. Don’t we all?

While we were talking on the bus, my mom brought up a drink from her childhood, a packaged orange juice that came in round bottles. It reminded me of Buzzballs. We spoke about alcohol and wondered out loud: what’s curaçao made out of? I opened Wikipedia and started reading out the page. But as we speculated, a woman standing by chimed in. A stranger. She said it was boiled from bitter oranges. They strip the white part from the rind and use the latter together with the pulp, she told us, making gestures with one hand — the other holding on for dear life as the bus started and stopped (another passenger’s whisper: this bus driver’s driving sucks!). This lady, now a font of wisdom, had caught my eye before due to her clothes (a matching set in a pretty baroque print); we happily thanked her; she moved on. When she caught my eye again I wondered: where did she learn this? On a late-night Wikipedia dive last month? Was she from the country of Curaçao, or a loved one? Did she visit? Did she like drinking? I didn’t catch her name. I only knew what she wore and what she said. I think a lot about strangers when I’m out and about. I assume things. I judge.

In the end, my beloved Wikipedia confirmed her words. And her clothes were the same pretty baroque stamp that my first-grade teacher wore on her coat, a chic older woman with a chic name who was almost to retirement, or past it, and just liked to tell stories to children. She favoured me. She liked greek myths, too. I still remember her fondly—I remember many teachers fondly—even ones that hated me, and I was hateable. Cute, a cute kid—a sweet little girl—I’ve always been, but hateable inside. Full of turpentine. I think a lot about how people judge me: big-eyed and quiet-voiced, saying strange and funny things, a lucky pretty thing that hates its lot in life, ungrateful and arrogant and mean. Being bright means feeling alone. It’s not romantic. It makes me less bright. Depression kills your braincells. I will never be the same. I never regret little things, but I regret every inch of this. Though I had no power to stop it, I still regret letting it happen to me.

The bright electric-blue color characteristic to curaçao is food dye. Did you know this? I watch short videos, sometimes, where bartenders make cocktails. A drink that calls for curaçao purely for its color makes its taste secondary—the bitter orange, properly a laraha, doesn’t make the drink. Its identity is non-esssential. The important part is the façade. And curaçao — the drink — is a corporate invention. It’s named after a country that was once a colony. Nobody questions the Caribbean’s production of luxury tropical goods. Even at their big age.

“My appearance was designed with attractiveness to the largest number of people possible in mind. If the way I look is pleasing to your eye, then I am working as intended.” ³

Isn’t it easy to order a drink, anywhere you go, and not know what shaped it? Or to watch someone else drink and not know why? If I was curaçao, I wouldn’t want to live like that. I’d start a journal. I’d go on hormones. I’d want to change.

And as always:

Thanks for reading!

#2026 #has image #longform #🌕