Hi ho...

I feel sick.
I’ve barely slept.
I can’t face my breakfast.
I want to run away. A long way away.
I could get a train or plane ticket and just get the hell out of here: I’m sure I could afford a B&B for a while. Maybe I could learn to forage, or use the fading remnants of my charisma to blag a place on someone’s sofa? I’m sure someone would take me in…Wouldn’t they?
I could feign a sudden trauma and become mute, that might work.
I could develop a sudden allergy to whiteboard markers. Near fatal, it would be.
If I didn’t live on the ground floor, I could throw myself down the stairs…
I could eat some of that gunk that has grown at the back of the fridge, that might do it.
Projectile vomiting!
Semi-permament incontinence!
I could gnaw off my own hands…

I am a lecturer at a college of Further Education.
Today is the first teaching day of a new term.

I have yet to meet any of my new students. I am crazed with fear and apprehension - far more so than any of my students could be. This rising panic has been building up for a week or so, to a point where I am getting palpitations, nightmares and breathless panic attacks. I try to relax, try to tell myself that it will all be fine, but it doesn’t sink in. If anything, every year it gets worse…

Give it a fortnight and everything will be back to normal. I will cope. I will stop panicking about being unprepared, entirely unsuited to teaching, having nothing to give these people, or that I will be found out as a fake, that I won’t “get away with it” any more, that I will be doing more harm than good… All will be routine and manageable, calm and order.

But for now…

I feel sick. I’ve barely slept. I can’t face my breakfast. I want to run away…