10 - i lllllove preparing for uni exams

hi everyone! welcome to my 10th diary entry.

this week has been absolutely insane, and in general september has also been a bit crazy.

i've prepared an exam in a very small time even though the amount of things i had to study was. a bit overwhelming, let's say.
there were two books (one was 500 pages long and the other around 230) and 5 essay-books of various lengths (a couple were around 200 pages long, the others were between 80 and 100). i honestly didn't read all the essays. i went through one of the long ones and one of the short ones, and for the others i either read summaries on the internet or watched videos because i didn't have enough time realistically.
this was making me feel super anxious! i like to go through all the material properly or i feel like i haven't done enough and, between this and the anxiety that i have when it comes to oral exams, the two days before the exam were absolute hell.

i was mega stressed while reading everything i could read, which made it a bit harder to understand things: my brain was half processing the info and half telling me i had to be quicker, and the result was that i was actually going slower.
i had some long crying sessions, struggled to sleep properly, to eat properly... but i have had it even worse in the past! so i'm a bit proud that my anxiety levels are now 1) actually allowing me to sleep even if the length(?) and quality of sleep could be better 2) not making me have actual panic attacks where i think i'm dying! 3) not making me decide to skip the exam even when i'm unsure of my preparation, which was impossible for me before. 

the day of the exam i was quite anxious but my usual feeling of "i need to GET OUT OF HERE" were actually nowhere to be seen! a part of me was very scared of failing (which would have made my parents disappointed and possibly make a bunch of annoying comments about not putting enough effort into things and being very slow at progressing in uni), but i told myself i have been through a lot of bad times with my parents and i've always come out of it alive. 
i also was scared of making embarrassing mistakes in response to the professor's questions since i had some info purely coming from summaries and i was terrified it might have been somehow wrong?

but the professor was actually super chill. the first question was, pretty ironically, about one of the essays i'd only read a summary of, which almost made me panic, but i managed to tell him everything i knew about it and i didn't make a single mistake, which i guess gave me a bit of confidence and made the rest of the exam go very well. i managed to make connections between the information fromt the essays and the content of the narrative books, and it felt like the whole thing was just a chat about our ideas from the books rather than something i was about to get graded on, which is something i'd never experienced before. i felt like the professor was genuinely interested in hearing my perspective rather than just asking me questions to know how much i'd studied which is how exams usually feel for me. 

he then made comments about how anxious i looked, he said when i entered the room i looked like i thought he was about to execute me, and he basically told me to get professional help (KINDLY THOUGH! all the comments he made were very clearly empathetic and i appreciated that he didn't just go with the typical "you shouldn't be anxious you know things!" which is something some other professors have told me in the past and is unfortunately... pretty useless...)!

little does he know, managing to anxiously go to his exam without having fully analysed every single essay in detail was the result of me having professional help...
like the "i'm about to be executed" me is already the #healing version of me lolol

anyway i got a 27/30 which is not the top grade but it is a very good result and yeah. pretty happy about it!

i think i'm going to get something for myself as a little treat. there's a perfume i've been wanting to get my hands on, shouldn't cost much so it's the perfect thing for the occasion!

that's it for today's entry lol bye!!

disclaimer: as always i haven't reread this at all so if at any point there are typos/spelling errors/the wording is weird, ignore that !!!