I’m drowning. Somebody please save me from the ocean of final papers and assignments I’m drowning in, because there’s no way that I’m going to make it out of this semester alive.

OK, I probably will. I always do. So to speak, this isn’t my first rodeo—and it won’t be my last what with two more semesters to go. Every semester I get back up onto the Norse Bull and pray to any merciless soul that I get through it. Preferably, in one piece.

If I was going to come away not in one piece, I’d probably be sans a brain.

For me, it’s not finals week that has me humming a death march. It’s the two weeks before finals weeks. Right now, I’m trying to trudge my way through an annotated bibliography knowing that I still have more to get done. The only light that’s on at the end of the tunnel is my laptop begging me to charge it.

These final weeks are some of the hardest I’ve ever faced. I’m a straight up bear to be around who can’t seem to get enough sleep and who can’t string together a logical sentence unless it’s about my classwork. These weeks are overwhelming, stressful and panic-inducing. There is no clear cut way to survive it unless you’re a super genius who has great time management skills, and if you are, are you even human?

My life tends to be composed of post-it notes at this time of year. They’ve got angry little scribbles on them that have been crossed out to mark what I’ve done and what I’ve still got to do and ideas for the next assignment down the road. Without them, I feel out of control. Lost. Writing my life down for these last few weeks helps calm the raging (yet exhausted) beast that is my stress.

I always try to get stuff done early, but then my mind goes to that terrible place where I think about how I have a month left or how I’ve already got so much to do. Next thing I know, it’s the end of the semester and I’ve got even more to do.

The beginning of the semester trains you to think that life’s going to be easy—that it won’t get more difficult than a paper here and there, the occasional quiz. Hey look, an exam. But it’s all a trick, because then it all tumbles together until it’s uncontrollable and you’re Captain Jack Sparrow running from those people in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest," which is your metaphorical end-of-the-semester (end-of-life?) work to do.

Why do we even do this?

I guess because it’s worth it. Because we have dreams. Because even if it’s just a laptop light at the end of the tunnel, it’s still a light. Because we’ve already come this far and put this much time, effort and money into it, so there’s really no going back.

Because we have a break just around the corner at the finish, taunting us, and soon making us forget just how much we hate the weeks before finals.