Tick tock, tick tock, make your bed, go to class, click-clack on the keyboard, dinner. Stop, take a breath. See a friend? Hug, catch up, chitchat, chat shit, shit, it’s late and I did no work, click-clack, click-clack click-clack click-clack—there’s laughter outside and I have to chase it!—and how on earth is it 12:00 a.m. and I have nothing done and tomorrow morning is impending and I’ve got to go to bed!

Goodness gracious and good morning.

Or at least that’s what the purple sickles under my eyes and the mess of papers on my floor and grooves in my neck from my necklace sighed at me from the threshold from my bedroom to the world beyond. Goodness gracious and good morning, you diva. You look just a little bit like shit.

I brushed the voice away. Nothing a little mascara and a good outfit couldn’t fix, but it was a small shock that I required those extra measures to enliven myself this early in the school year. Two weeks prior, my under-eyes had been bright and I’d been recording my morning jogs on Strava. I’d even envisioned running a 5K for fun. For fun! Now my running shoes hid somewhere beneath the winter clothes cascading from my leaning pillar of cardboard boxes. Did school really claim me from myself so fast? I’d only been back for one fortnight and I was unspooling.

Am I reminding you of you at all? I hope not, less because I commiserate (which I do, of course, but already my emotional bandwidth is tautening, so you’ll understand my empathetic limitations) and more because I fear the state of the world if so many of us are juddering around with our fuel gauges grazing the empty line. How bleak! Can you imagine the colossal pileup if one too many engines stalled, and we couldn’t swerve out of each others’ ways, and all of a sudden we were all backing up the entire world with our overwork and fatigue? I’m from LA—I’m no wimp around traffic—but that thought gives me goosebumps.

I hope you read this with your eyebrows raised in mild shock at another woman’s chaos, and I hope you feel the warmth of self-assurance tickle your fingertips. You can wipe your brow. Say, “Whew, glad that’s not me.” I won’t be offended.

But. If I’m reminding you of you, then first, I’m sorry, and second, I’m glad you’re here. Maybe my ruminations will resonate—camaraderie and shared experience and all that. Or if—though it would be quite a shame, dear reader, after willingly sacrificing my dignity to you—you find my ideas of self-betterment misdirected, they may at least help you identify superior alternatives.

Since becoming conscious of my start-of-semester disintegration, I’ve dedicated myself to its study. What brings on this phase shift with such semesterly reliability? If I can identify the triggers, maybe I can teach myself not to pull them. Though if I have already fallen apart, then how do I reassemble myself?

I think I just might have cracked the code. So don’t get too excited now, because I’m about to walk you through it. We’ll start with a journey back in time.

I spent last spring semester struggling over classwork—or really, the thought of the classwork, as I could never actually get myself to do it—for a subject I simply didn’t care about. I’d been invigorated by my friends (good!) who expressed vibrant interest in things such as naval war strategy and nuclear politics, and I had mimicked their enthusiasm by taking the same classes as them (bad…). I had known, of course, because I know myself, that this was out of step with my better inclinations. Contrary to popular belief, I’ve really never been one for Russian-language battle maps without translation. And yet, I strategically avoided recognizing that my education felt most fulfilling when oriented toward literature and writing (in English, no less).

I love language. I love the way it moves, the way an arrangement of words can ring a gong in my chest, and, when rearranged, whistle instead like wind through chimes. I love how language can distill a swirling nebula of sentiment into a crystal of pure thought. It’s a magical medium to me. And maybe naval war strategy and nuclear politics are a magical medium to my friends. But why suppress the interest that’s been begging me to pay closer attention with a task that makes my head hurt and my heart feel leaden?

I ended up buckling under the weight of my (mis)education fatigue. I dropped the war strategy class two days before the final exam. I scrambled to compose literary pieces for the writing workshop I had once been giddy about.

One might figure that, at the very least, all that spring-semester trouble would have yielded a lesson learned.

Not quite. In just these first two weeks back on campus, I did it again. Shopping period had me racing back and forth between classes I didn’t particularly care to take. I tried out—and tried valiantly, if also futilely, to keep up with—twelve, maybe thirteen lectures and seminars. Like clockwork, halfway through what felt like every possible first-day class offering, the clip-clop of my boots knifed through the professor’s lecture. I fell asleep to the furious whir of my computer as it processed enough PDFs to constitute a small library. No wonder I woke up feeling disastrous.

But now, finally, I can say with true, delighted conviction: No more! I’m taking English classes galore and I’m loving them.

Of course, what we do in academia accounts for only a single square in the infinitely capacious quilt of our personalities. One threadbare square might not be so bad, but too many and the quilt will fall to pieces. I, for one, am in the business of holding it together. Luckily, there are so many means to that lovely, lovely end.

For example: I’m tired. But I hear chatter downstairs, and I have a voracious social appetite. Where do I turn at this fork in the road?

(1) I can force my drooping eyelids up with the might of coffee, and stomp downstairs for conversation inebriated by the cocktail of physical exhaustion and caffeinated palpitations. I can wake up tomorrow morning with my head full of fog and my social appetite still less than sated.

(2) I can poke into the kitchen, say a sleepy hello, go to bed, and wake up tomorrow with a full cache of oxygen in my lungs and my friendship engine oiled. I can sit down for a conversation with a pal and, the day after that, without having to dig through any brain mud, remember the full array of thoughts and giggles that passed between us. Looks like this way, I’m a better friend and I have more fun.

Isn’t it funny how readily I choose Option 1? I also find it funny how, held up against each other, Options 1 and 2 simply do not exist on equal planes (2 is better, in case that wasn’t clear). But, call me subversive: the phrase “against my better judgment” has always had the most alluring little ring. Or maybe, if I stop and think about it, the most Pavlovian ring. University—that sly thing—seems to have conditioned me into identifying the path towards self-destruction and charging down it.

But yesterday I implemented a strategy I’ll call “Operation: Against My Worse Judgment.” I heard the chatter. I felt the fatigue. I felt the magnetism toward the chatter, and the deeper—and easier to ignore—magnetism towards my bed. Reflexively, I rose, went to see what the fuss was about. And then on the threshold of my bedroom, I stood. Wavered. Tipped toward the door. Paused with my hand on the doorknob, and thought: Oh. This is that critical moment. And I lifted my hand and turned around and tucked myself into bed and woke up with slightly lighter under-eyes than the day before. 

In order to appropriately underscore the significance of my evolved behavior, allow me to take a page out of the Oscar Wilde reading I did for a seminar that I dropped within 30 minutes of attending. And maybe my retention of this reading, however misinterpreted, is proof that even our less wise choices may still yield some value.

Helping myself is part of an individualistic effort toward team success (Wilde’s vision of team success was socialism, but that’s just a technicality). And “helping myself” is not just my endeavor to right myself from my capsized heap on the floor. It’s even more—it’s a vision of a clear way forward, where anxiety, fear, and burnout are, at most, visible as hazy specks on the horizon. Evidently, by the close of last spring semester, I’d done little in the name of this mission. In Wildean speak, I chained myself to the laborious, suppressing my personal proclivities for the sake of conformity (what I’d misconstrued as inspiration), and so I limited the potential of my inner artist, my inner genius, my real, unadulterated self! Ignoring my natural dispositions stymied the energy I put into my tasks. But if—as I’m beginning to do now—I honor those dispositions instead, my contributions to society will become more energetic and innovative, and society will respond with an equal and opposite reaction! A beautiful cycle!

Envisioning a world where I have my shit together gets my heart racing. Life becomes so much kinder when you’re not rutted into patterns that exhaust you. 

I admit that Wildean individualism and forks in the road and all are romantic and maybe a bit extravagant. I’m a college student living in a house with six roommates, and I’m mildly obsessed with Facebook Marketplace. I went to a non-disciplinary hearing with Brown’s off-campus dean on Monday for a noise complaint about a 20-person birthday party in my backyard. I just acquired a bike to cut down on my home-to-class commute, and this morning, panting and sweating, had to walk it up College Hill, adding instead of saving five minutes. Theorizing my future achievement of holistic lifestyle balance and the realization of my artistic potential is nothing if not lofty, and writing this sentence makes me want to smack my palm to my forehead a bit.

But I think that’s the point.

It’s hard to take myself so seriously all the time. To experience the consequences of my decisions in genuine psychological and physical forms. It shouldn’t be so hard to keep up. I should be allowed to wake up in the morning without the buzzing in the back of my head telling me I picked the wrong fork in the road yesterday, without the pressure of a cinder block behind my eyeballs. So yes, I will make my aspirations romantic and extravagant, if anything, just to add a bit of fun to the whole journey. I’ve always loved a dramatic flair—it makes books fun, it makes friends fun, it makes writing fun—and now it can make taking care of myself fun!

Let that echo for a moment.

Taking care of myself is fun! Fun! FUN!