Usually, I wake up pretty early, at least by college student standards. I don't have a problem waking up at 8:00 a.m. for class, and usually on weekends "sleeping in" for me means sleeping until 10:30 a.m. at the latest. Usually, if I don't have any alarms set, I sleep until about 9:30 and start my day.
This past Sunday, I woke up knowing I had slept later than normal. I looked around my room, and judging by the light coming in through the blinds I figured it was sometime after 10:00. I turned on my phone, and to my immediate horror, the screen read 12:30 p.m. I leapt out of bed and ran into the kitchen, thinking my phone must be wrong. But instead, the clock on both the oven and microwave read the same thing. I immediately began to panic. I had so much stuff I had to get done. I couldn't even remember all that I had to get done, I just knew it was a lot.
And that's when I realized I was at that point in the semester where I am simply running on autopilot. Every day I wake up, go to class, take notes, eat, do homework, study, and go to bed, only to repeat it the next day. It's that time in the semester where tests are non-stop, everyone is sick because their immune systems are crippled with stress, and professors are starting to talk about finals, because in the grand scheme of things finals are not that far away. So, when I knew I didn't have anything I had to wake up for and didn't set an alarm, my body took advantage of that and caught up on all the sleep it had missed the past few weeks.
If you asked me what I was learning about in my classes, I would probably answer "I don't know" for most of them. Instead of planning meticulously like at the beginning of the semester, I take everything one class at a time. I scramble to know material for an exam, and then move on to studying for the next class. In fact, in the past few weeks, there were a few times when professors mentioned upcoming due dates, and I realized that I had forgotten about the assignment completely. The only comforting thing was that everyone else in the classes seemed to be making this face too:
And that's because everyone is surviving, but not thriving. We all know that everything will most likely end up being okay. We will pass our tests, finish our papers, remember our due dates, and take our finals. Just right now, nobody has any idea what is going on. And then, as if it's a miracle, we pull it together for the final stretch.
We will get through it, we just have to endure a rough couple of weeks first.
