So I've been trying to play grown up today, looking at the UMass Dartmouth page again, trying to figure out if I'm making a mistake. Also Jazzer's post and everything going on has driven me to try and find information about caniadates and policies I am horribly uninformed about. That is sad, seeing as it's kind of important to my future to know about these things.

Does anyone here go too, or know anyone that is involved in U Mass Dartmouth? It's my first choice but I haven't even visited yet, panic is beginning to stir in the not so far reaches of my mind.

A lot of my friends are looking at intense places like Purdue, Brown and Hampshire, my sister was even offered full scholarship to Wellesley for her AP scores, but I am not an Ivy league kid. I almost didn't go onto junior year. I'm not dumb, but shit happens. I'm ADD, which isn't an excuse but doesn't help matters, and at the time I had higher priorities than my homework, like trying to help self injuring friends. And a friend I later talked out of committing suicide, which I don’t think I could have done if I hadn’t gotten to know her so well talking to her on the phone every night for about three months while she was out of school laid up on the couch on sever pain medications, the ones I later convinced her to flush down the toilet. That was the worst night of my life. I felt like I had lost contact with my stomach, and didn’t find it again until two days later when I had to stay out of school because it was so upset with the stress. Last Sunday I watched I sat in horror as I saw it begin to start again. I promised her things would get better. They didn’t, they got worst. And now I don’t know what to tell her. And while I’m figuring it out, I am struggling to keep up my own class work, both because my first term grades are going out to colleges, and so my mother doesn’t take away my one truly safe place, my one relief, almost my one love, Unitarian Universalist youth conferences. Completely youth run, completely accepting, completely freeing and completely amazing. Last year I didn’t keep my grades up, I couldn’t go. I went to the first one this year and I can’t bare the thought of not going this year. I am actually shaking at the thought right now. This is sick. And as for college….. That is past shaking fear. I just don’t know what to do. Right now I would love to self injure. I haven’t in 6 months but for one slip up, and they have been a shitty 6 months at times. Its been hard, but things were getting better. They got better. I’m doing ok in most of my classes, if not one or two, everyone but that one friend is safe right now which is calm in my experience, and I am with a wonderful guy that makes me really happy. So why do I feel like I need this, all of a sudden?
It actually makes a lot of sense when I think about it. I am losing control. College, my mother is going to be unemployed soon, not being able to stop seeing my father, even my new relationship with mark, all things I a have to make myself give up control in, wither for better or worst. So this is classic. Fuck it. I get in good thing with this boy, and it makes me panic for control, and when I suppress that and chill it works better and I am happier but my fingers get that old old twitch. In my mind, I can’t describe it. It feels like everything is bending a certain way, like around a cylinder. I try and push it out flat every once In a while, smooth it down for a bit. And then things feel flat for a while, but In a safer way. I control myself. I don’t need it. But wanting it is annoying, not for itself, but because I can’t escape it. It’s not something I started or learned. It’s a mentality. It has always been there, it always will. I feel like I need a warning label, I feel like people ought to be aware before they start to care “Watch out for this one, she comes with baggage