HELLO, it’s me; your local leaving cert student.
I’m not going to inform about how long it is to my leaving cert – because honestly I don’t want to think about it.
Thank you to random passerbys who seem to think it is their duty to inform me that it is three weeks away. Woah – that really was a whole new pile of information, thank you so much for the heart palpitations.
I apologize for the sarcasm. As you can imagine, I have become a bit more highly strung these days.
Continued below…
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It’s been a bit of a slow spiral into insanity if we’re being honest. Makes sense considering that every waking moment of my life now revolves around studying or thinking about studying or dreaming about studying.
Or you know having nightmares about studying. It’s come to the point where I literally feel guilty for washing my hair. Upkeeping my personal hygiene has become a guilty pleasure. It’s that bad.
I used to run into the odd leaving cert student over the years. I listened to them complain. I took in their pale faces and strained physique and thought to myself “they must be over-exaggerating” or “God it can’t be that bad”.
I would like to apologize for being such an idiot. Truly.
My weekends are study marathons. My evenings are stress infused study frenzies. I am powered by vats of tea and Dairy Milk bars. I have lost the ability to hold a coherant conversation with anyone.
My snapchat replies are just apologies – “hey sorry I didn’t reply to your message from 6 hours ago, I was buried so deep in my study panic that I didn’t check my phone”. Or something to that general effect.
And what is all this for? Why do I bear the look of absolute exhaustion? Because I want to get my first choice. I want to get my college course. I want it. I want it so badly. I can only hope that these last two years of my life – all that work – will pay off.
I guess I will leave it up to you to decide if it is to fair to subject hundreds of thousands of teenagers to this mental obstacle course every year. Is it fair to ask young adults to endure such a battle?
I can’t think of a better way to do it right now; and considering our education system is about 20 years behind the times, I wonder is it worth my time wasting my breath? But for now, I am going to take hope from the knowledge that all those other kids did it before me, so surely how hard can it be.
Light a candle for us. Let’s do this.
