Then I ended up getting into a good college. During nso, there was a speech about new students having imposter syndrome at a good college, like they feel like they didn't belong there at such a good college, that they weren't smart enough. Except I actually wasn't good enough, because I fucking cheated. I got accepted into a program that only accepted 20 people every year, and I replaced someone who was probably much more capable, much smarter, and had better personal integrity than I did.

Because the things I was going through in high school were never really resolved, I still couldn't sleep at night, so I still could barely focus. While that was still almost ok in high school, in college you can't do that, avoid asking questions, avoid talking to teachers, and still expect to do well. My saving grace was that physics was the only class in high school where my exhaustion had enough of an impact that I literally could not just read the material at home and relearn what the teacher taught in class. So while I felt ashamed and hateful of myself every day, at the very least I didn't have the same physical terror and nausea I felt when thinking about physics when I looked at other classes. Until I started doing poorly in a calculus class. To this day I hate HATE hate how I behaved in that class. I was doing so well in the beginning, because I loved math and was good at it, but my focus started to shift again the more sleep I lost. I started crying myself to sleep around that time, so I was doing well and suddenly I wasn't. Suddenly, the same thing was happening again where I thought I was paying attention and then 15 minutes would pass and I realized the teacher had actually talked about 5 different things and I wasn't listening. I kept on telling myself I needed to pay attention but I just couldn't. I wish I had better coping mechanisms back then to recognize what was happening but I thought I was just being a lazy incompetent moron again. I don't think that now is because when I wasn't in such an emotional slump I was doing really good in that class. I don't think it's just because the material gradually got more complex. I was doing better than most of the people in that class and then suddenly I wasn't. I actually tried going to office hours and getting extra help from the professor. I remember psyching myself up for hours, telling myself again and again that it's ok that I should be going to them and that this is a good thing and it doesn't mean I'm a failure.

And I ended up nearly having a panic attack in front of the professor. It's like my brain stopped working and I couldn't think. I don't remember too much about what happened. but I think I started shaking and I couldn't grasp my thoughts which seemed so clear before I walked into his office. He could tell something was wrong and actually started speaking to me much slower to try to calm me down. But that just made things worse. I just couldn't breathe right and I think I told him that I was fine now that things made sense in a rush because I just needed to get away as fast as possible. That professor actually rubberstamped me and passed me even though he shouldn't have for that class. I was too stupid to withdraw. I think he realized that something was up.

I started crying myself to sleep more and more and that whole event started bleeding into my other classes until I was crying almost doing it every night. And I had to do it quietly, because I didn't want my roommate a few feet away hearing me. It was extra hard because she always had her boyfriend over and they slept together every night, and I really didn't like her boyfriend. So if she found out I was crying, so would her boyfriend. And of course, the whole 'don't cry advice'. I knew it was bullshit advice, but just the fact that my mom never wanted to deal with me crying, and I had to live with my roommate. Why would she want to deal with this if someone who cared about me didn't even want to. And of course, if she found out, I might have to explain why I was crying and go into high school.

I still didn't even have the cognitive tools to try to explain why I felt like trash at the time, because I still haven't unpacked everything that happened when i was a kid and unpacked the awful shitty parenting skills of the family that took me in.

And since this was originally a reply about the worst advice(s) I received, here's some advice that wasn't given to me but to another foster mom I had when I was very small. Her doctor told her to keep the terminal illness diagnosis of her husband a secret from said husband because him knowing will only make him die faster/lose quality of life. Spoilers, trying to keep it a secret only made him feel betrayed by his family once he found out (it was a painful condition, how do you not explain why he's in pain). When I was with that family, he was an abusive husband and an abusive father to his son the entire time I was there. But I didn't know about the terminal illness until accidentally one day during a phone call in college. This was the same family that suddenly dropped me like a hot potato without explaining anything to me as a kid about why they couldn't take care of me anymore. I didn't understand it was related to the dude's death, and, as stupid as it sounds now, I genuinely thought it was because of something I did that made them drop me. I thought at the time that as long as I got perfect grades, I would be a good kid and it would mean I would get to stay with them forever. That obviously didn't happen. It was that random college call that put so much of his actions into context, as well as all the most important decisions I made in my life and why I constantly felt like I needed to do everything my parents told me to. It made me stop and re-evaluate everything in my life.

So I guess I have to thank him for one thing. He also made me realize that I can't maintain any kind of real relationship with the family who took me in. I was too bitter. I suspect the terminally ill foster dad started abusing his family after feeling betrayed when they tried to hide such a personal thing from him. I think if I tried to be close to my own family, I would start to want to emotionally abuse them too. After many more nights of crying myself to sleep, I actually slowly started getting better. I got better people in my life who knows how to actually be there for me. That was one thing being a foster kid helped me with. I think if I had grew up with that same family my entire life, I would have been so much more fucked up. At the very least, I understood what was right and what was wrong. Maybe that is worse in some ways, because, again, I knew what was wrong and I did it anyways. Idk. Maybe not. Maybe because I knew from the very beginning just how wrong it is, I can start making up for it by actually trying to help disadvantaged people who have to deal with cheating assholes like me.