My goal in life is truly just to find a fulfilling job that pays enough. 

I want to be able to have free time in my future so I can spend time with friends, family, and to do hobbies I like. It feels like the only way to get this is to have a well paying job. 

I’m 18 years old and time and time again the media keeps telling me how my generation (just like millennials) will almost never be able to afford a house. That unless we have a high paying job, we’re gonna have to be working huge work weeks to even survive. 

I see it with different families, the rich ones get to travel, enjoy life, relax once in a while. The poor don’t. 

I’ve been interviewing a lot of these “richer” people and asking about their college degrees. They worked their fucking asses off for them but they did it in the end. All of them are immigrants like me, and they managed to work jobs, have kids, move countries, and still finish with the degree. 

My issues is I’m struggling so hard to pass and I think the culprit is my anxiety. 

In highschool my anxiety was my biggest weapon, it got me to sit my ass down and study hard enough to get good grades. I did really well and I thought I was really set for engineering, like I could really do it. 

But engineering is fucking whipping my ass, all I do is study study study. For the past weeks I’ve been pumping out assignments, tests, and exams. And I still almost failed my physics midterm. I passed by 3% and my gpa is holding on by a thread. I now have a linear algebra exam on Friday that’s worth 40% of my grade and I’m freezing up because of my anxiety. 

Just a little context. We have labs tests and assignments due everyday of the week, and then since it’s midterms we have an exam every Friday since end of September to early November. I took a reduced workload cause I knew with my anxiety I wouldn’t be able to handle it. After my physics midterm I tried to finish 2 weeks worth of school in one week so I could free up time to study for this exam. I was able to do that and I finished all my work on Sunday. But here the issue, once I sat down to study for the exam, I only had 4 days to study. I got so overwhelmed I had my first really bad panic attacks that’s I haven’t had for years. They won’t stop now and I wasted a whole day because I keep getting panic attacks. I’m down to 3 days for studying. 

I’m really really trying, but it’s just so much material and I think I’ll fail again. 

I don’t understand why I’m having such a hard time when people have it so much worse then me and are still continuing. I don’t have to commute 2 hours to school everyday like other people, I don’t have as bad as a workload as the other engineers. 

But yet I cannot relax, my thoughts from anxiety are draining me and I can’t end them. I don’t know if I can do this for another 5 years. But I feel like my entire life’s well-being depends on this. 

How do I end my anxiety so I can study more efficiently? It’s making it 10x harder cause so much of my energy is spent on anxiety instead of using it to study. I can’t stop it tho. I’m so tired. 

Is there another way for me? I can’t find any jobs that seem fulfilling and well paying. What do I do?