The panic rising.

I always feel worst when I'm on the brink of doing something wonderful. Anticipation, nerves, fear - they all turn up like unwanted strays, scratching at the door for scraps. You open up and let one in, just for a moment, and suddenly your house is full of wild cats, yowling and making noise at all hours when you just want a bit of piece and quiet. The house being me in this case.

In round about 36 hours, I will be on a plane to South Korea. I have no idea what we're going to do in South Korea, except that we are staying in a hostel in Gangnam purely for the "Gangnam Style" jokes, two years too late to be funny (and also because it looks lovely). We are going to the De-Militarised Zone, because it looks interesting, and hopefully going to see some temples - but really, we have no idea what's going on.

That's what I'm looking forward to. The endless, non-linear nature of exploring. It's a real-life sandbox game, with all the exhilaration of having no rules to follow. At the same time, it's downright terrifying. We have no set itineraries or things to do.

My only rule is "come back with stories".

It was what my friend wrote to me. He sent me a card, bless him: he posted it to me at home, and informed me that I had to come back with stories to tell him. He said the best words came from the heart, and that was what he wanted to tell me. Funny, how people always compare our relationship to something romantic. We have a deep platonic friendship with lots of cuddling, and somehow people always assume we must be dating. Only our minds are dating.

So, I have 36 hours to my flight. I haven't packed, and right now I feel like any attempts to be witty and gracious and charming to the people I meet in hostels will inevitably end with me being laughed at. I can't wait for the new people, the new friends, the new ways to waste my nights under foreign skies, but I'm so so scared I'm going to balls it up.

What if it's not worth it?

What if I don't get any new stories?

Deep breaths, I tell myself. Breathe this world deep. Everything will be fine. The panic will pass, and soon you will be flying.

After all, you have too much to do to be worried.

What we talk about when we talk about stress.

Recently I've been sleeping a lot more, and dreaming a lot less.

This isn't how you're supposed to respond to stress. You're supposed to lie awake long into the small hours of the night and twitch with anxiety. Stress is supposed to give you nightmares or patterns of interrupted sleep. You're supposed to eat less and less and slowly wither away, consumed by a vague but lingering sense of panic, in the back of your mind or the pit of your stomach or some other fringe of your body.

I haven't been getting that.

My A-level exams are looming. For my international readers (hi, I kind of can't believe you exist), A-levels are the standardised tests you do in England at the end of your last year of school. Their results arbitrarily determine your future, if you get into the university you want to or are sent to your insurance choice or have to go through the confusing process known as clearing - which seems like a January sales-type deal, where you apply to empty places that other universities have due to their applicants messing up - or if you need to retake your exams. Of course, if your future doesn't involve university, then they are a lot less relevant.

But the fact of the matter is that I am relying on my grades to get to university. My offer from the University of York is fairly low and pretty easily achievable for me; I can drop a grade from my predicted mark in each subject and still exceed it. Perhaps this is why I'm not stressing the way my friends are.

Of course, with everything I do, I feel like there is a niggling fear that I will fuck up, and I will fail. Every time I write an essay, I turn it in thinking about how I could have improved it, and how it's my own laziness which is preventing me from doing so. When you don't have to work hard, sometimes you stop caring. I'm worried that this will happen to me, that I will become complacent from treading water and suddenly sink. I am cool and nonchalant, but inside my head I am afraid of doing it wrong.

This is what stress is to me. I don't down bottles of wine or party into oblivion to forget, but I don't obsessively revise either. Stress over my impending trip to Japan is probably compounding issues - it's less than two months till we leave and we haven't finished booking accommodation! That is stressing me out! What if we get to Kyoto and have to illegally camp in a park?! By comparison, I'm finding it a little difficult to care about the GOP position on immigration or William James' essays on religious experience or the dramatic presentation of power in King Lear.

Sure, my future might hinge on how well I can bullshit about Webster's poetry, but what if I don't book a hostel in Hiroshima in time and have to pay an extra five pounds a night?!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have no sense of proportion. I am a little bit stressed over a lot of things, so I focus on the most innocuous because - well. That's just it. I don't know why. Maybe because it's the least scary.

It'll all be over soon, and until them I guess I will continue to sleep less and eat about the same amount, and hope it all works itself out in the end.

Frustration: a vicious cycle.

It’s hard to describe a crippling lack of motivation to anyone who has never felt it themselves, but in my case, it’s something like this:

You understand completely what you need to do, how to go about it and when it needs to be done by. When you actually come to look at it, everything drains out of your head except a faint numb feeling of “no”.

You procrastinate. You re-order your sock drawer. You delete people off Facebook who you haven’t spoken to for years. You play and re-play Temple Run 2 until you beat your high score. You donate money to charity and stare at blazers on ASOS. You paint your nails. You take a long bath with a glass of wine and tell yourself to relax, that you just need to de-stress. You do everything you can physically think of to avoid having to do what actually needs to be done.

You look at it again, load up the document and stare at it for hours. You convince yourself you can magically transfer the words in your head onto your computer without having to actually type anything. You check Twitter. You close Twitter. You disconnect the internet. You check Twitter on your phone. You try again.

You find your mind thinking about all the other things that need to be done, the other projects you’ve been putting off, and the plans you haven’t yet confirmed. You realise you are behind in every sphere of your life. Then you remember how all your friends are going out on Friday, and you didn’t get invited – and that’s okay, because it’s not like you could have gone anyway, you just have so much to do – but you’re bitter, and you spend a good ten minutes planning your micro-aggressions and carefully choreographed responses in case they mention it in passing. Then you realise that's stupid, and bitchy, and you have things to do.

You realise you’ve been feeling this indolent for two months. A week, people can understand. More than that, and they look at you funny. You’re not depressed; you still function properly in all other areas of life. You still laugh and go on dates and watch television. But you just can’t work properly.

The more you think about how much you have to do, the more wound up you get, and the less you actually do – and suddenly it’s one in the morning, and you’re writing a blog post because it seemed easier than trying to find seven hundred words about something you can’t bring yourself to care about. You get frustrated and irritable, and snap over the tiniest transgressions. Then you feel guilty for being angry, and add that to the guilt over not being able to work, and you end up too mired to stress to do anything but brood some more.

You tell yourself to stop being stupid, that this work is important and your future hinges on it, but you find it very hard to think about anything as big and abstract as the future being pinned to anything as mundane as an essay.

You stand up and make a cup of tea. You sit down and drink the tea. You stand up and get a biscuit. You sit down and eat the biscuit. You wander into another room in the house and sit there instead to see if you feel any different, and then feel guilty for wasting ten minutes that could have been spent working.

So you load up your computer again and tell yourself that this time, you will concentrate. For real! No distractions! You can do this, and it won’t be as bad as you think it will, you promise! And you manage to write something – a whole seven lines! You reward yourself by putting on your pyjamas! And then you return to your computer, and realise what you wrote is irrelevant, and you delete it, and you once again have no idea what you’re doing or where you’re going.

And you’re so, so sick of feeling like this, because it’s getting in the way of doing things. You want your motivation back. You want your sense of purpose. You want to do anything that will make you finish this essay. Except, you know, actually write it.

You stare at it for another hour before going to bed. You go about your daily routine the next day looking awful, because you didn’t get enough sleep, and you say you were up late working, when really you were up late worrying about the fact you can’t work. You tell people you're finding it hard, and they just tell you to take a break and try again, and you promise yourself that is exactly what you'll do.

Then you get home and have a nap, and tell yourself you can do your work now you're better rested, and you realise you could really do with a cup of tea…