*very long chapter ahead*

Soooooo. It's been a while.

I went on a hiatus because of school. 4th year is so difficult. Thrown into the deep end doesn't even describe it. Thrown off a cliff to the sharks is more accurate. The sharks are your teacher with the constant deadlines.

General life updates:

I've had another label change. Panromantic asexual for now. Demiromantic technically did describe me and could still fit, but I just decided I didn't want to use it, and that's OK.

I became really active on Tumblr.

I've made quite a few new friends through all the different classes, most of whom are LGBTQ supportive.

I've come out to everyone who I consider safe.

Remember how I said business was wild? Yeah, it got worse. The headmaster came into our class a few weeks ago. He also showed us the amount of bad behaviour reports people in the class had gotten.

For context of how serious this was - when people are badly behaved (on a serious level, not just talking) or forget their homework etc, the teacher has to put that into the computer system. The headmaster can access these at any time. Most classes have 1 page of bad behaviour. 8 weeks into the term, our class had 11 pages. 11. Pages.

There's the possibility of me being able to go to pride next summer - my friend is arranging a sleepover where the next day we'll go to Belfast for pride. Making sure my parents suspect nothing will be the hard part.

I thought this term would be great, but workload aside my mental health took a drastic spiral. There was one week in October where I had 2 panic attacks days apart and cried several times in school over the next few weeks. The pressure really got to me. I've learned how to manage the workload a bit better now, but that was awful.

I quit classical violin lessons and I'm waiting to start Irish Traditional lessons! I was really hating classical. I still get to be part of school orchestra.

I got over my crush - actually 2 crushes, boy crush and girl crush. Only took months for both of them.

I got into chamber choir, which is basically the choir you have to audition for at my school. Senior choir you technically don't have to be able to sing. In chamber choir we did lots of extra performances at various carol services, including one at a massive cathedral with great acoustics.

(I'm considering publishing a chapter with my singing voice in it, so just a warning. I'm not big headed I promise, I think it might be good for my confidence)

French is hard. We have to write quite a few essays. We've done 4 now. I'm improving, but I still haven't gotten an A* yet. I've gotten really close - I've had a B+, A-, A, A/A* but not a solid A*.

I don't think I've ever mentioned that I have a stutter? Basically I have a stutter that can be really severe and does not help with presentations and French orals. The reason I had my first panic attack this year was because of it.

We had to do a presentation in English where each group had a different topic, but there was some overlap between them. My group was 2nd last out of 6 or 7 groups. Everyone's speeches were amazing. As each group went up and each person spoke, I got more and more nervous. We had been told reading off our notes was an automatic fail, so I had decided to learn my notes, cut it down into flashcards and then expand on them in my speech. Problem was my notes weren't exactly detailed to start with, so that left almost nothing on my flashcards.

Problem 2 - my part in my group had 2 parts. One of those parts was covered almost entirely by another person in a different group (the overlap, it wasn't plagiarism or anything), and another person had covered the second part (again, overlap in topics). So basically when we went up, I was already nervous to start with, I had next to no notes with no expanded detail compared to others in my group, and my speech had already been entirely covered by 2 different people. Add in the fact it's a very large class (like 30), everyone else before us was amazing, and I was the last person to speak in my group with everyone else doing amazing parts and you have the perfect ingredients for a disaster.

It was my turn to speak. I opened my mouth, and no sound came out. I got my first few words out before the weight of the situation hit me like a brick wall and I had to stop again. According to my friend in the front row I was trembling so badly my hands were visibly shaking. I tried to speak again before I had to stop at the same point and I started breathing really quickly and shallowly. My English teacher just said "OK let's take a break" as he saw I was struggling. I got down to my seat, absolutely ashamed and started crying. Great.

That was a low point. I did the speech the next morning by myself and got a good mark, but I wish I could be a functional human being.

That was long and rambly and unnecessary, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway. I'll do occasional updates every so often. I got off school today for Christmas so that's cool.

I miss my friends on here. Bane-Of-Olympus Angel-Yusa TheAzureStar are the first few that come to mind. I miss you all ❤️ hope you've done OK.