Please Hold For a Panic Attack

I'm not quite sure why I thought I would be immune to my regularly scheduled yearly panic attack while here in England, but I think it's coming over me right now. As my parents will tell you, I usually have some sort of mild mental episode at least once a year that causes me to go through much distress over my schoolwork and the acting stuff I may or may not have going on at that point in time, and I've just come to expect them now. Sometimes it's more dramatic than others (last year's was not so great), but this time, it's just... weird.

The panic has been coming over me slowly over the past few days. Don't worry, I'm not in a bad way or anything, but I am starting to think about a lot of things because I only realised yesterday:

MY TIME IN ENGLAND IS RUNNING OUT.

I can't believe it. I only have a little over a month left in this country, which I fall in love with more and more each day. I think I realised this when I started getting excited that my family was coming over to see me soon. I can't wait for them to get here, but when their stay is over, so is mine, since we're going home together. I don't want to leave London. There are still so many things I haven't done. I love it too much here, and it's hard to think that when I go home, and even when I go back to school, I won't see a lot of the friends I have here, some because they live in Europe, others because they live in faraway states, and still others just because we don't have the same major.

There are other things, too, that all hit me today and are causing me to seek stress relief. I haven't gotten my last two academic papers back and I'm worried about those grades. And while I was in France, I missed my history revision class, which isn't a huge deal, but I really would have liked to attend. My teacher posted the list of reading material that will help us on the exam but I lost my i.d. card yesterday which means that besides the arduous process I have to go through to get a new one, I can't even get into the library, let alone take out books. I think I may ask one of my friends to let me check out books on their card so I can start my studying (or as they call it here, revision.) I'm really scared of this exam; I can B.S. essays until the cows come home, but taking my first and only exam in the British school system is kind of daunting. No, scratch the kind of. It's daunting.

I think another contributing factor to my weird state of mind is that a lot of my really good friends from Arcadia had their last opening night on Thursday and will be presenting their theses and graduating soon. This means about 80% of my close friends will be gone when I start school next year. Some of them may stay close by, but it will never be the same as it was, and I feel bad that I can't see their final projects and watch them graduate.

The long strip of paper you see in the picture above is about half of my novel broken into little bits of scene. I have realised how many problems there are in it and am taking it apart and using this paper to examine and fix it. There is much about my writing that I'm beating myself up over, but this is not a writing blog, so I won't go on about that here.

Thankfully, a source of stress that went away today is my final (non-exam) essay. I had a thousand words due today on my Adaptations performance. It was easy once I got started, but it was definitely freaking me out for awhile. (Of course, I found out after I turned it in that it's due two days after I thought it was. Bleh. Either way, though, it's turned in.)

I know that this entry was more brain vomit than an entry... if you got to this point, I love you. I think it's all going to be okay, but as usual with these things, I just have to figure that out slowly.