Liebes Tagebuch, heute habe ich angefangen meinen Kopf zu essen!

Mittlerweile weiß ich gar nicht, mit wie vielen Personen ich über mein Abitur gesprochen habe. Sei es Mama, Tori, Julia oder gar ich selbst – immer wieder spürte ich den Anflug von Panik und die gleichzeitige Ruhe in mir. Und ich frage mich immer noch: Wie geht das??????

Da ist nämlich dieser einer Teil von mir, der rumschreit, und ein weiterer Ich-Teil sitzt seelenruhig da oder weigert sich Rosa Parks-haft, sich von der Panik anstecken zu lassen.

„Steh jetzt SOFORT auf und mach etwas für Geschi!“

„Nein.“

„WILLST DU DENN GAR NICHTS UNTERNEHMEN?!“

„Nö.“

„Okay, nochmal von vorn, klar und deutlich: Ist dir bewusst, dass es egal ist, WAS du willst und WAS du macHEN MUSST???“

„Ja. Ich hab alles vor Augen. Du hältst schließlich keine Sekunde deine Klappe.“

Ich kann beide komplett verstehen, weil es ja meine Stimmen sind.

Einerseits bin ich voller Panik und Schuldgefühlen, dass ich so spät mit „Lernen“ (falls man das überhaupt so nennen darf) angefangen habe. Andrerseits denke ich mir: eigentlich kann ich’s doch. Englisch sollte nicht allzu schwer sein; Geschichte hab ich grob im Kopf und mit dem Auswendiglernen zwei Wochen vorher anzufangen wäre sowieso sinnlos; Mathematik ist ebenfalls nicht so schwer – also, wozu die Panik?

Und genau diese Keine Sorge, ich hab ’n Plan-Einstellung bereitet mir noch mehr Schuldgefühle. Schließlich mache ich nicht viel und wenn, dann ist es stumpfsinnig???? Aufzeichnungen angucken, in der Formelsammlung markieren und schöne Begriffe aus dem Englischen aufschreiben – ob mir das wirklich so viel weiterhelfen wird, ist anzuzweifeln.

Es fängt an mit Englisch. Tortilla Curtain, Othello, Slaughterhouse-Five, Death of a Salesman, Brave New World, Educating Rita, etliche Kurzgeschichten, American Dream, South Africa, Utopien – bin schon seit Wochen gespannt, was genau dran kommt und welchen Vorschlag ich nehmen werde.

Es folgt Geschichte. Ich lerne vom Wiener Kongress bis zum Potsdamer Abkommen, mit einem großzügigen Herauslassen vom Ersten Weltkrieg, die genau wie die Französische Revolution unwichtig erscheint. Ich werde den Vorschlag nehmen, bei dem ich am meisten weiß und am meisten einbringen kann. Ich werde versuchen, mindestens 1500 Wörter zu schreiben, auch wenn ich Herr Jonas mit 10000 Wörtern gedroht habe und deswegen eigentlich Rezepte und Briefe in meine Klausur einbauen wollte. Am allerwichtigsten: Ich werde nicht in Panik verfallen, einfach mein Wissen schriftlich teilen und aufs Beste hoffen.

Das schriftliche Abitur endet für mich schon am Mittwoch mit Mathe. Mein Ziel: So viele Aufgaben wie möglich erledigen, keine Zeit mit unnötiger Panik und Schusseligkeit vergeuden und besonders darauf achten, keine Hetzfehler zu machen. Denn ich kann Mathe, ich verstehe Mathe und ich bin gut in Mathe. Mein Mathe-Mantra.

Danach bin ich fürs erste frei. Danach kann ich nur noch auf die Ergebnisse warten; hoffen, bestanden zu haben, und schon seelisch für das mündliche Abi vorbereiten.

Ach und dauerhaft weinen vor Erleichterung!

Außerdem habe ich gelesen, wenn man seine Sorgen vor einer Klausur aufschreibt, dass man sich hinterher erleichtert fühlt und ein besseres Verständnis für seine eigene Panik hat. Das kann also nicht schaden. So, here ya go:

Am I nervous because of my final exams? Hell, yes. Although I am not as nervous as I was before my Cambridge exam. Isn’t that ridiculous? That certificate wasn’t a must-have. I wasn’t forced to take that exam (although it costs a lot and that worried me). It was my choice, because I love English. Mostly because I can communicate with a lot of people on the internet. I guess I have to thank tumblr for my English grades – nothing did really help me with being enthusiastic about a class than reading rants, episode reviews, analyses about characters and even the most awkward text posts. Seriously. People might say that tumblr is full with dumb kids who hate school and praise women and sexuality and individuality way too high. Yeah, that might be true. But that’s one thing I love about tumblr – helping every individual to at least like themselves and encouraging people to grasp unto life and not giving up.

But (the true but-part to the people might say-sentence) tumblr can be pretty educational, especially about the whole education-thing at someone’s life. There are not only critiques about (bad) school systems. Tumblr also teaches a lot about words and their meanings and where they come from. That is extremely cool. I remember one post that shows more than a hundred of words that explain what makes a street to be a street, what makes a lane to be called a lane and what the differences are between all those specific terms. For a wordsmith like me it was some kind of nerdgasm.

There’s also another awesome post that I recently found and therefore remember very well: about writing rules. There were about ten rules about writing a text, but every rule that was described was instantly broken. You could call that irony – like fighting for peace or fucking for virginity – but it was intended. It was fun reading that – because you could taste the humour and the joke behind these rules. Maybe I will print them out and carry it with me.

Well, back to my real issue. My English exam and why I am kind of stressed but also totally cool about it.

I already said two reasons: my love for the English language and how well I understand it, beyond schooling groundings.

Because something else shaped me into this Wannabe-Brit with more American English than British English. It’s my love for books.

~ great annoyed sigh is heard everywhere ~

Yeah, I know how cheesy that sounds. Look at me, I’m so special, because I’m a bookworm and can’t decide which book is my favourite. Nevertheless, that makes it no less true. 

It started with Harry Potter. Well, no. It started with 13 Reasons Why. Tori said I would like that book. Shame on me (and be proud of yourself, Tori, for that!), because I really did enjoy that book. I liked it so much, I nearly started worshipping it, although that was because I wanted my class to read it two years ago. That was when I started to hate it.

Back to the real plot: when I finished 13 Reasons Why, I wanted to read more English books. They’re so easy to read, so fluent. So when I got my eBook, I started to read Harry Potter in English and, oh boy, best fucking thing I ever did. I mean, I already siriusly loved these books when I read them in German and was after the 17^th time reading them still awestruck. But reading them again, this time in English, was what Aladdin tried to show Jasmine – a whole new world.

Suddenly there were more puns. I do love puns. Plus, it was a new experience to see Harry use his native language. I remember in the last book, when Voldemort  searched Grindelwald and talked to a German woman. It was so weird to read – in German! – that that woman changed from German to English. Because I read everything in German and I couldn’t know, that she first talked German, because she didn’t need to speak English, and then talked English, but it stayed German, because, well, the book itself was German. Or in the fourth book, when Weak!Voldemort changed from Parseltongue to English – it was cringe-making reading that part in German. (But I understand that whole translating-stuff, it’s complex and it’s so douche of me to kind of bash translated books.)

When I finished Harry Potter – I cried so many tears again, no kidding – I couldn’t force myself to read German books again. Suddenly, they sounded so crude. Isn’t that weird? Your second mother language is all of a sudden rough and harsh and makes you feel uneasy.

So I stopped reading German books. I downloaded many other English books, got some from the school library and the only German books I read since then were assigned from school or the hand-me-down Lustige Taschenbücher.

At first, I didn’t notice how me reading English books affected me. I just enjoyed my books, so what? But then my English grades got better and better. My “Fehlerindex” is minimum thirteen points. My only mistakes are false tensed verbs and hastily copied words from the dictionary. I was already called an “English expert” in ninth grade by my (naive) English teacher. Even Mr. Brasch finally acknowledged my high lexical storage, calling me a vocabulary book.

Then there’s also my style. What is even a style? And how can I have one, if I can’t even explain my tutoring student what exactly that is and how you can improve it. But I have one and Mr. Brasch loves it. I’m being serious – he grades my style with almost only thirteen points. Since the first exam, he always writes comments about it in my exercise book. Nice style, good style, well written – even superb. That really boosts my ego, although I still don’t like to read my homework out aloud.

So, what am I babbling about? If even the seller, whom I talked to before Lion King, told me that my English is fine and how well I can communicate with someone, especially freely and obviously without any kind of stress, why then am I so strained about my coming exam?

It’s English. I can do it. Heck, if it’s something utopian and slash or Fulfill Your Dream-thing, I am really sure that I will rock that. 

But I guess that’s the thing that makes me want to retch and throw my guts up. I don’t know what’s awaiting me tomorrow. I don’t know how well I will do. I don’t know if I will crumble into panic, although I do not plan to do so.

I just have to remind myself: I’m good at English. I can even be superb at English – and when I wrote that text, I was bored, annoyed and occupied with a toddler on my lap. And tomorrow, I will be well-rested (well, hopefully), I will be in an adequate or at least organised room, I will be surrounded by calmness and other exam takers, some of them my best friends and equally nervous. I will smile at them as often as possible and wish them not only luck, but also success, because we can do it. I will have nice snacks and lots of refreshments before me – I mean water and a huge amount of tissues and a tube of lotion for massaging my dry hands. But I will not stare out the window, hoping it’s soon over because I feel under pressure. Because it’s just another exam, but one that requires more time and causes the school more work than usually.

Now you know what I wrote, Tori. I hope you’re happy, because at first I didn’t intend to upload it, but whatever.