The Inevitable Breakdown

You know when you have that feeling that something bad's going to happen? When you know that at some point in the near future you're just going to crack because of some minor thing that really doesn't make a difference in the long run, but all the pressure and stress and all of the little things combine and the feeling of dread gets bigger and bigger until you're left in a sobbing heap on the bedroom floor?

That's going to happen to me at some point soon. I can feel it. I've spend the past few weeks watching as friends and acquaintances go into panic over the upcoming exams. And then I realised that at some point before my exams, that will be me. Sooner or later, I'll be the one who breaks down completely and totally in the middle of a lesson. I'm betting it'll be either science or maths - the two subjects I'm most concerned about.

I think it's pretty much expected for GCSE students to freak out around this time. I mean, we're being told constantly that we only have X weeks until our exam, and every teacher thinks that their subject is the most important. We're being forced to make decisions. We're evaluating which subjects are our priorities, and which we can pretty much discard from our futures. For me, languages are what I want to do. I love languages. But I've done 60% of both of my language GCSEs. So my other two subject choices for A Level are history and psychology. History, sure. Definitely my top priority. Psychology. Well. To do psychology at my school, I need Bs in English, maths and science. Oh.

You see how all these small decisions snowball? For a person who wants to study, say, English, History, chemistry and maths, their priorities are clear. For someone who wants to focus on the arts, again, their priorities are clear. If you're like me, though, and you have to work really hard on subjects you don't like to do the one subject you do have an interest in... I have no useful advice.
I know I repeated this sentiment in an earlier post, but I think it's incredibly true: Growing up is hard to do.

In Which I Parody Shakespeare (Badly.)

This has been hanging around in the notes section of my iPod for weeks now, and I thought I should put it to good use. I'm not The Bard, just a British teenager with a love of writing and a procrastination habit. As my GCSEs draw ever nearer, the revision process is starting. But it's difficult and I was bored so I wrote this. Note: I don't own Hamlet. I just own four Shakespeare-themed coffee mugs and copies of a few of his plays.

To revise, or not to revise: that is the question:

Whether 'tis better for my grades to procrastinate

With Twitter and fanfiction,

Or to take arms against the sea of procrastination,

And by revising, end it. To tweet; to sleep;

No more; and by prom we can see the end of

The heart-ache, and the sheer, undeniable terror

During the wait to results day

Before we go to Reading. At last we sleep;

We sleep: we dream of summer

For in that extended summer what dreams may come,

When we have finished our GCSEs

And can finally pause: we'll burn our books

And forget what an alpha particle is;

For until September, the world is ours

Three months of freedom, three months of sun,

We forget stomata, the water cycle,

The electromagnetic spectrum,

We forget who Gorbachev was,

The Cold War was a boring topic anyway

What even is caesura? What's enjambement?

We don't need to know now, anyway 

Because the poetry anthology's gone

CGP guides are a thing of the distant past 

Our exams will be stressful,

We'll cry together on Skype,

And wonder why we took textiles,

Media does make cowards of us all,

And thus the days of chemistry revision

Is made worse with the uncompleted textbook,

Because you spent two years on Core Science

But we have just a few months

To prepare for action.