6:00 a.m. 

Plan to sleep in, but expect your body to frighteningly jolt you awake as you scramble to find out whether or not you have a club meeting at 8 a.m. 

6:15 a.m.

Discover you in fact do not have a club meeting and you nearly had a panic attack for no reason. Go back to bed. 

10:05 a.m.

(Assuming you don’t sleep through advisory)…make your typical fashionably-late entrance, only to be met with a semi-aesthetically pleasing slideshow that incites uneventful Google Meet chat discussion about how all your classmates are also feeling mentally drained and stressed as expressed through their 3/10 mental health check rating. At least now you feel less alone. 

10:30 a.m.

Advisory went longer than anticipated. Now time to lay in bed and stress about how it’s Wednesday, which means the day after tomorrow is Friday, and then there are only two more days until it’s Monday again. 

11:00 a.m. 

Go for a walk because what says “I’ve lived through quarantine during a pandemic” more than a neighborhood stroll. Plus your mom said you had to since you’re usually in your room all day staring at a computer screen doing school by yourself. Thanks, mom, for the lovely reminder that my life is boring and unexciting. 

11:30 a.m.

Contemplate reading a book for fun, then realize you actually have three books for school that you haven’t started yet. Get the books out. Stare at them and consider if this is truly how you want to spend your mental health day. The answer is no.

12:00 p.m. 

Water your already-dying plants, then worry that you are overwatering them. Proceed to lay on the ground and stare at the ceiling. End up falling asleep for several hours. 

6:00 p.m. 

Wake up to eight newly-graded Canvas assignment notifications. Realize they are all the ones you haven’t turned in. Feel overwhelmed. 

7:00 p.m. 

Binge your favorite comfort show for the seventh time and ignore your responsibilities (this is more stressful than actually facing your responsibilities, but you don’t know that). 

11:59 p.m.

Frantically log in to Canvas to turn in the history homework that you did in fact do but haven’t submitted.  

12:01 a.m. 

Your Chromebook was lagging, no celebratory confetti, and minus two points on your History assignment. 

1:30 a.m.

Open your computer. Create a document for your essay that is due tomorrow. Feel a sense of accomplishment…for some reason. Close computer.

1:35 a.m.

Start math homework.

2:00 a.m.

Stare into the refrigerator light as you realize that math stopped making sense after they started using letters instead of numbers. 

3:00 a.m.

Go to bed actually feeling slightly worse than you did at the beginning of the day. 

Notes:

Congrats! Another mental health day in the books. For optimal stress levels do not repeat every Wednesday.