3 August 2025

I've felt very exhausted lately. It feels like I've got a lot of uni work to do and not enough mental energy for it. I think that it's also making me very irritable. I sometimes wonder if I'll have the energy to passably finish the courses that I've already committed to in the comming months.

You seem unwilling to fully express it, but you are deeply anxious about how well you will do. And not unjustifiably. At best, failure could set your education back months or even a whole year. And neither you nor I have much patience for empty platitudes about inherent self-worth.

Indeed. How I will live with that is a bridge to cross if we get there. Right now, I will do my best to pass everything. I've often surprised myself with what I can when needed.

On a separate note, I tire of restraints and inhibitions. I don't like constraining what I do, but not as much as I fear consequences for acting freely. It's not always big things. It's things like self-censoring on my wiki pages because I don't want to step on Admins' toes. It's masking some of my stranger quirks, like meowing, in situtations where they are not common. It's worrying about how well I'll do on busywork assessments that I see no purpose for other than assigning a grade to me.

I am so sick of feeling controlled. I want to be in control. I don't held to account. I want to be beyond constraints. I've often minimised it to myself by saying that part of me wants god-like power. But lording over others without any possibility of being desposed of is one of my most frequent fantasies. However, such power doesn't exist. Ultimately, each person decides whether to defer to authority. Only the possibility of those who do defer enforcing the law, or one's own conscience, can make one comply. Power is a social construct. Nobody is immune to society turning against them.

It is however, what you want, Dark One. And the same principle applies to you. The pressures don't make you do or not do anything. You just choose in the face of the imagined consequences.