Halstead Imagines

Self-Care

A/N: I hope you enjoy this one! Thank you for reading and remember to vote and comment!

Enjoy!

God, you hated college. Well, it wasn't college you hated exactly, it was more your schedule you hated. You worked two jobs, one at a coffee shop during the week and another at a group home on the weekends. You were also taking a full course load and needed time to do homework.

For the past two weeks, you had been getting tension headaches due to all the stress. You always made sure to get your assignments done in your time between classes on the few days of the week that you were stuck at school because you had blocked your classes. And, you loved when you had to work the night shift at the group home on the weekends because you didn't do much except paperwork, clean, and check on the kids to make sure they were sleeping, and this meant that you probably worked one to two hours during an eight-hour shift and used the rest of your shift to cram in all your homework for the next week so you weren't drowning in it by Tuesday.

Today was one of those nights.

You had gotten all of your stuff done for work, and were currently sitting at one of the tables doing homework. You had finished up reading a few chapters in your psych textbook, so you moved on to your Spanish homework. Your stupid professor gave assigned homework (not just reading the textbook) and it was all random definitions of people, places, and things. And, to make matters worse, some of those words weren't even in the assigned chapters, so you had to go hunting on the internet for them! And then, he gave you a pop quiz every class before he even lectured over the topic.

Yeah, you didn't do so good on those. But hey, your grade was still an A-, but you knew you needed to start studying for these stupid quizzes if you wanted to keep that grade.

So, you logged into the website you used for school and saw that the homework for the week wasn't there yet.

The first one was due by Tuesday and the other was due by Thursday. But, you needed to get both of them done now. You didn't have time the rest of the week. Fieldwork Monday, work and classes Tuesday, work and classes Wednesday... etc.

At least next week is spring break.

But, that still didn't help the fact that you needed to get this Spanish homework done now because you'd be sleeping late tomorrow and making food for lunches for the week and and and...

You felt tears sting your eyes and quickly shook your head, trying to keep them at bay.

Everything would be fine.

But if you didn't do this homework, then you'd have to do it between classes on Tuesday, which meant you wouldn't be able to study for the pop quiz that day, which meant that you'd fail that pop quiz, which meant that your grade would go down, which meant that--

"I'm gonna go to the bathroom," you told your coworker, Tamara.

"Okay, I'll be here," she responded.

You used your keys to let yourself out of your groups' unit and then down the hallway and into the staff bathroom. Then, you closed and locked the door.

You looked in the mirror. Your lip quivered.

You looked utterly exhausted...well, more than you normally did on your second night shift in a row. You thanked God that you started needing glasses this year because at least they hid the bags under your eyes because you had stopped wearing makeup. You didn't have time to put on makeup and frankly, you didn't care. It was just one more thing to remember and sometimes, it would make you break out and get acne if you were too hot and started sweating while wearing it.