exhausted, over-it, and somehow still standing (April 17th 2026)

Okay. Okay. Where do I even start? Today was one of those days where you get home, sit on the edge of your bed, stare at the wall for a solid four minutes, and wonder how you made it through without completely losing it. spoiler: I barely did. But here we are, alive, blogging, and ready to give you the full debrief.

grab a snack (you'll need it), because today was genuinely a LOT. Let's go class by class because honestly, that's the only way this is going to make sense.

first period and I was already running on fumes. I spent most of class working on my presentation, which sounds productive until you factor in that I was running on maybe six hours of sleep and three sips of whatever was left in my water bottle from yesterday. my brain was functioning at approximately 40% capacity and yet here i was, trying to make slides look coherent and professional. The struggle is real, people.

I was so tired. like not just the regular kind of tired, the kind of tired that sits behind your eyes and makes everything slightly blurry. The kind where you're staring at your screen and rereading the same sentence four times and it still doesn't go in. If you've been there, you know. If you haven', cherish your sleep, bestie. cherish every single second of it.

okay so LIFT was actually kind of interesting? My friend needed help with her project, so I was basically in full tutor mode, explaining things, going back over stuff, trying to make it make sense for her. which i actually don't mind, there's something weirdly satisfying about being the one who gets it enough to explain it.

but THEN, and this is the part that made my whole day kind of surreal, I got interviewed about stress. like, how i handle it, how i cope, what my stress level looks like right now. I had to actually think about it and answer honestly, out loud, to another person. Honestly I was shy the entire time. I  said a 7 out of 10, which honestly sounds scarier written down than it felt saying it out loud. Here's the thing though, there's a massive difference between stressful and unbearable. a 7 means yeah, things are a lot, the to-do list is stacked, the presentations are looming, and my sleep schedule is a war crime. But I'm not at the point where I can't cope. I have my little routines. I have my playlist. I have my people. It's a 7, not a 10 and that matters.

I love history. I genuinely do. the drama, the politics, the "wait they actually did THAT?" moments, it's all very compelling to me in theory. In practice, today's class was… a lot of notes. mostly because my teacher talks. and talks. and talks some more. and then keeps going.

we were covering 1980 to 1987, which is honestly a rich period — so much was happening, the world was shifting, and there's no shortage of things to say. But the way it was being delivered today? I was writing so fast my hand started to cramp, trying to keep up with the sheer volume of information coming at me. my notes look like i transcribed a podcast at 1.5x speed.

babe. My teacher yaps. and I say that with the most affection I can muster while my wrist is still recovering. It's like they find a topic, lock in, and the exit sign just ceases to exist. every tangent spawns three more tangents. We're going from reagan to pop culture to foreign policy to some story about their cousin who apparently lived through the 80s in a very memorable way. It's a whole thing. A very long, note-heavy thing. more notes. population dynamics this time, which is at least a topic that makes you feel something — like, there are a lot of humans on this planet and we are, as a collective, doing a lot to it. heavy thoughts for a Friday, honestly. I was just trying to write down the key terms without accidentally staring into the existential void. Note-taking is truly a discipline that nobody prepares you for. like, the art of listening and writing simultaneously while also trying to actually understand what you're writing down and not just transcribing sounds? incredibly underrated life skill. My notebook is basically a scrapbook of barely-legible thoughts at this point.

and then there was math. oh, math.

so context: we're on quadratic functions. degree 2. The graph is a parabola. you've got your vertex, your axis of symmetry, your opening up or opening down situation, i get it. I genuinely understand it. so when she handed out the worksheet, i was like okay, let's go, let's get this done.

I finished it in what felt like two seconds. because there were forty questions. on the same concept. forty. like, we did not need question 23 to confirm that i still know what a parabola is. We did not need questions 31 through 38 as additional verification. I understood it at question 4. I was still understanding it at question 40. The graph is a parabola. we know. we all know. She knows we know! and to make it even better, i hadn't done the homework that was due today. So I did it. today. in class. while she was rambling about functions. multitasking at its finest or most desperate, depending on how you look at it. I'm choosing to see it as a win. The teacher was talking about functions and I was writing down function answers with one hand and secretly feeling like a genius with the other. barely. but still. If today had a vibe it would be: tired but tenacious. I was running on empty from the first bell, survived a presentation grind, tutored a friend, got interviewed about my feelings (which was surprisingly cathartic?), took enough notes to wallpaper a small room, and conquered forty parabola questions before anyone could stop me.

The stress is real. The tiredness is real. But so is the fact that I'm still here, still doing it, still getting things done even when the energy is just not cooperating. Sometimes that's the whole win. not thriving, just surviving with a decent attitude and your homework technically submitted on time.

Tomorrow is a new day with presumably fewer parabolas. I'm choosing to believe that.

Thanks for reading this far. you're a real one. 🩷