The days fly by without giving me a chance for writing a blog post, even though there would be quite a few topics I’d love to discuss if given a chance. However, university takes up a lot more of my week than just the hours I sit in the classrooms – there’s a lot of mandatory homework to do if you want a chance to sit the exam at the end of the semester.
Tuesday remains the most difficult part of the week, when my mood usually goes down considerably. That’s mainly because I have three homework sheets due on Tuesdays plus another one for physics due on Wednesday. Because of the other worksheets, I never manage to start the physics homework in advance, and so I come home at 6 o’ clock in the evening on Tuesdays, eat something and then sit down for doing my homework. Yesterday it was a quarter to midnight when I finally finished… Sometimes I just want to cry on those days. Sometimes I actually do.
Socially I’m slowly making progress at uni; sometimes I have conversations which carry on longer than three sentences. There are two people who attend the same maths, physics and geology classes as me (aside from the lectures we all have in common) and who also went on excursion the same day I did, so we end up in the same places all the time and somehow I managed to not scare them off.
In all seriousness, though, I’m trying to be socially more inviting and not retreat so far into my shell that I become a mere physical presence. And I learned that they – a girl and a boy – have friendly, unthreatening personalities, which allows me to relax a little and not guard myself quite as much as in the beginning. 98% of the stuff we talk about is strictly university-related, so I can’t say I know them very well: in fact, I only found out their names today because our physics tutor reads them out loud when we get our homework back. However, it’s still progress from when I started uni a month ago.
Outside of university, life continues to go well – I need to write a different post about that, though, as I’m too tired tonight already.
Lugubrious Layara 
I don’t like tuedays either – but my reason is different. I always figure that in the working week it is the longest day because I am no longer refreshed by the weekend and still have a long way to go until the next.
For you, I guess it now makes little difference from this perspective as the work of university is constant. I can see why Tuesdays are a burden.
Do you plan for a/some healing activity on Wednesday? Not necessarily time consuming things, but things that you enjoy or treats or things that make you feel good? It sounds like you need to reward yourself for enduring Tuesdays in some way to refresh yourself once more so that they don’t eat away so much of your soul’s strength.
When I think of regular days that are awful, I think of the children’s book ‘Pollyanna’ where she decides that these are her favourite days of the week because once they are over she need not do it all again for a whole week! I’m not sure that I could bring myself to that perspective quite – until the moment that last homework sheet was done and dusted. But I think Wednesdays might come close to being my favourite day for her reason.
I’m glad to hear that you are gradually making contact with people. It is so much harder to start with for mature aged students than those who are following the path from school, even before anxiety enters the picture. Hang in there. It doesn’t feel like it at the moment, but there are other people who take time to feel comfortable with people around them and making friends. It is harder still when a lot of your colleagues are only 5-10 years older than your peers’ kids – some of my peers’ kids if they became pregnant in high school or soon after would even possibly be in college/uni by now. Not sure about you. I don’t know about you, but that could feel seriously wierd and make me feel out of step to start with!
Sorry for taking so long to get back at you – for all the same reasons as stated in the post above.
I try to just relax a little on Wednesday evening and watch some TV or something equally undemanding, because I’m too exhausted for anything else. It’s only on Thursday evening that I can really lean back a little and the actual recreational part starts on Friday afternoon, when classes are over for the week. It’s not ideal, but something I have to live with until the end of January… I try being extra nice to myself on weekends, making an effort to do at least one “special” activity like seeing a friend or going to the cinema to give my mind a break.
The age gap is in so far problematic as it reduces the topics I can talk about to the others, and the way we relate to many things. For example, my professor mentioned the Roermond earthquake from 1992, which I remember from personal experience – but none of the “kids”, because they were infants at that time or not even born yet.
I don’t mind younger (or older) people, but if they come in such large groups like here, it singles you out by default.
Yeah. I get it. Imagine what they would look like if you tried to explain to them how exciting it was when people got a computer in their house and how you’d visit and all play games on it. Or that last time you were at uni you submitted hand written assignments!! And the search engines in the library if you had access to them!! how laborious they were!
(Microfisch at the local library? what’s that??) 🙂