Just venting about my life

When I was eleven years old, I had a nightmare—a nightmare that never left me, its images haunting me to this day. It wasn’t that scary. There wasn’t a killer running after me, the world wasn’t ending, and I wasn’t turning into a monster. No, it was far more realistic—something that could actually happen. In this nightmare, I fell asleep during classes. The context was that I was leaving primary school and going to middle school for the first time. I kept falling asleep until the day of the exams, which I failed—all of them—in that nightmare. Sleeping during classes not only caused me to fail my year but also led me to fail my life. I remember waking up in cold sweats, telling myself that it was just a dream and would never happen.

Soon after this, I learned that the exact room I had envisioned myself falling asleep in was not a middle school classroom but a university one. This realization led me to believe such a thing would never happen to me. My eleven-year-old self couldn’t imagine being foolish enough to attend university if I wasn’t capable enough. She didn’t know back then that this nightmare would always linger in the back of my mind.

I was eighteen years old when it happened. It was a moral philosophy class. I hadn’t slept enough the day before—or had I? I can’t even tell because I was always tired. It almost became a handicap. I took vitamins daily in the hope that they would fix something, but even so, I was constantly tired—constantly daydreaming of going to sleep, hoping the classes would end soon so I could nap. That day, the daydreaming turned into dreaming. I closed my eyes because the lights were too bright and I was starting to get a headache. When I reopened them, we had moved on to another slide of the PowerPoint. I checked the time; five or six minutes had passed. I had fallen asleep. My nightmare had become reality. I panicked for a moment, not believing I had just done that. The images of my nightmare kept replaying, and the thought of having ruined my life kept appearing. I calmed myself down and tried to focus on the class ahead of me again.

Days passed, and I slowly forgot about that incident, but one thing persisted: my tiredness. I was so tired—all the time. It was a real issue. I was skipping classes because I was sleeping, not because I hadn’t slept the night before. I was sleeping approximately fourteen hours a day and was sleepy the other ten hours. It became unbearable—I was sleeping, missing classes, not studying, and making my family pay hundreds of euros for nothing. They were paying just so I could nap. The stress only made me more incapable of studying, and sleeping was my only comfort. I would sometimes sleep for sixteen of eighteen hours a day. I failed all my exams except one.

That nightmare came back to haunt me. It didn’t feel like a nightmare anymore—it had become a prophecy. A true prophecy. I quit university a month after my exams. I promised everyone I would get a job. I didn’t. For a whopping ten months, I hadn’t done anything. I was ashamed. I had fallen into despair. At first, it felt like a prolonged vacation, but then it slowly started to suffocate me. I felt like I was drowning, but everyone around me thought I was leisurely floating. The pressure from friends and family asking me when I was going to get a job only made me stress more. It felt like adding weights to my already drowning body. I had thrown my life away, just as that nightmare had predicted. I hated myself, hated my decisions, and hated my life—until I finally started swimming up to the surface again.

I slowly started making changes to the way I live and see myself. I regained confidence in myself and started studying for my driver’s license, eventually passing my theoretical exam. I’m going to start practicing driving in a couple of weeks. I also started looking for a job, which is starting to feel tangible. I regained my passion for reading, writing music, and dancing. I also found what I want to do next year: go back to college to study to become a language teacher. I feel much better. Yes, it took me 10 months, but it feels like life is on my side again.