Over the past few weeks I haven't been myself. Actually, that's not true. I've been a watered-down version of myself. I lost myself in my work. I started working at 8am and didn't stop until 9pm. The scary part is that I didn't even notice I was losing myself, not until I finally had time to sit down and write a blog post. Then I realized that Envy was... pretty much gone.

I'm in my junior year of college now. Three months in I can tell it's going to be a very difficult year. No matter how hard I work and how carefully I plan everything in my life, there are never enough hours in my days. So I started dropping parts of myself that I didn't need. The parts that took up too much of my time, but that didn't benefit my future.
Daydreaming had to go first. I needed those precious minutes to write reports, not to come up with blog post ideas or a chapter for a novel. So with daydreaming, writing also left my life, which was quickly followed by blogging of course. For a week my life felt very dull and empty, but then my workload was doubled and I had to make another sacrifice in order to have enough time for college.
I stopped reading. Not just blogs, but also books and magazines. Some nights I read five pages, then fell asleep. It made me sad that the days of 150+ pages were now over, but I didn't have much time to be sad: more work came my way...

For a few days I didn't know what to do. I tried to think, but didn't have time for that. I had to keep working. I tutor a kid from the other side of the street and also took on a translation job in August. My plan was to save up for a trip to India and Thailand, but those plans and the financial problems that came with them took up quite some time. So I stopped dreaming about travelling. I stopped making plans. I stopped doing everything that made me Envy.

I've lived like this for about eight weeks now. I wake up, go to college or internship, come home to do homework, tutor or translate, then sleep. Most days I'm so busy I skip meals. I lost quite some weight in the first month of junior year. I feel like I'm nothing more than a shadow of my former self. It scares me how I don't do anything anymore, yet I'm exhausted every night. I don't have time for my hobbies anymore. I don't have time for anything...

I never expected junior year to suck the life out of me, but it's doing just that. I feel like there's not much left of me and I'm very afraid to lose myself completely. I was planning on blogging regularly, but I can't. I can't promise when I'll write again, when I'll comment on other blogs again, when I'll be a part of the community again... But if I seem to disappear completely, if you see me lose that last little part of myself, please help me find my way back to who I used to be. Tweet me, mail me, smack me in the face. But please help me not to lose myself tonight, tomorrow night and all the nights after that...

Stay Awesome