There will be consequences, and it cannot easily be alright and will most definitely not resolve by itself.

First and foremost, I fear that I may have lost my best male friend yesterday. It hurts me just to think about it, to write about it, but I planned to go out with him and my kind-of best female friend but then there was a misunderstanding and my female friend couldn’t make it, and I knew that after the fateful Tuesday it would be far too dangerous to try and go. But now I feel that maybe the wrath of my mother would’ve been better than his wrath - when I called to cancel he had been there already, ready to watch the movie only to have to watch it alone. And I had done this far too many times before (as a gymnast it’s difficult to manage my time), and he vowed never to go out with me ever again with, of course, expletives. Now there is a big hole in my heart where I fear I have lost him, where I fear he has gone, he who I have depended on for so much joy and happiness. Or even if he’s not gone, that our relationship will never be the same and this will be a scar on the surface of an ever fraught situation.

But also, the pressure of a thousand badly done exams is still upon me, and I’m still trying not to think about anything. I dread my results - a feeling I have never before had- and only realize now how much I actually depend on my brains to give me confidence and ego, to make me feel that rush of superiority, almost, /condescension/ maybe, that I thrive on in the high school life where I am not beautiful, not even remotely pretty and live on laughter and intelligence. Without it, I feel like I am nothing. I feel like if I do badly I will have to reinvent myself for my final two years, that finally people will realize that I am not as great as they think I am.

And finally, with all this blocking out I know I am using my exams as an excuse to block out the responsibilities of real life. I have a piano exam which I haven’t practiced for, a clearance form I haven’t started getting signed, a thousand emails to reply to and a mailbox to clear to do that. I have to get back to gymnastics, which I am feeling ambivalent about and am not sure if I want to give up my newfound freedom although I know I must.

Life is hard, so hard. There are so many sides to it, so many different situations a person must balance at any one time, all of them equally important in their own way, all of them with prices to pay for failure. Do decide to take the opportunity cost by putting everything into a few things? Is it possible to do it all? I don’t know, but maybe I don’t want to find out. For now, all I want is for my life to go back to perfect.