I'm so tired I can't think. (From Haringey Independent)

I'm so tired I can't think.

2:06pm Wednesday 28th May 2008 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
•  

At the time of writing it’s three in the morning. I’m so tired that my eyelids are beginning to succumb to the enticing lure of gravity. On the right side of me are a couple of half finished Pro Plus packets and several empty coffee mugs. To my left is an open maths textbook, a pencil case and some illegible notes I have written to aid my revision. No, what I am doing isn’t revision, because that would suggest I have already learned all these intimidating equations. No, this is learning. From scratch. This is last minute, etch-it-into-your-cerebral-cortex kind of work, and it’s not fun.

In six hours time, I will be sitting in a large sports hall amongst other, more prepared students, working through my maths GCSE paper with trepidation. I look over the messy scrawls in my notebook, but can’t decipher them. I realise my dexterity went at about half past twelve. I am monumentally screwed. How I thought I could go through the past few school years shrugging off maths and not have it come back to bite me I don’t know. My work ethic, which could be best articulated as ‘learn it later’, was, it now seems, fundamentally flawed.

London is dormant, with only a few cars audible, but I realise that there must be thousands of other sixteen year olds doing exactly what I am - cramming. To those of you out there, you have my empathy. Or sympathy? Or both.

I know I shouldn’t be writing something this vacuous, being in my current situation and all that, but am doing so not only as it’s providing suitable respite from ‘Quadratic equations’, whatever they are, but because I feel I needed to follow up my previous blog entry which referred to the media’s attitude towards GCSE’s. They aren’t easy. I think I, at this present moment, am a prime example of this. Granted, it’s my own fault, but that’s irrelevant. I’m only young. How can I have been expected to take my education seriously?

I can’t write any more. My body is in a tormenting predicament. I haven’t slept in almost twenty-four hours, my eyes feel as if a copy of the dense “Revise Maths NOW!” has been suspended from each lid, yet at the same time copious cups coffee and caffeine tablets are starting to do there work, attacking my central nervous system from each and every direction. I don’t think that I have ever been this fatigued, yet nor do I think I will be able to sleep tonight. I’m going to sit in this chair now and endure what I can only imagine will be a catatonic waiting game, maybe occasionally slipping in and out of blissful slumber. Goodbye, and please (even though I definitely don't deserve it) feel just a bit sorry for me. I’m too tired to do it myself.