Making an actual effort to earn my credits this semester has all but decimated my free time. The times I visit LJ are few and far between. Roleplaying is all but nonexistent, and that is the issue I intend to address now.

The ultimate solution is one I've been fighting, but won't be able to defeat. In all likelihood, I'm going to have to give up RP for the rest of the semester.

When this idea first entered my mind, I could hardly keep from openly lashing out. Really-- I'm not exaggerating. Some of my friends might not know this, but roleplaying was the only positive point of my previous school year; distancing myself from my disastrous life via fantastical alternate personalities helped me to retain some semblance of sanity while I watched the days tick by. Upon the conclusion of the school year, I was able to escape that terrible environment and reconstruct my life into the enjoyable existence I experience today. Roleplay last year gave me my only social interaction, my only sense of comradery, and my first brush with love ('car-crash' would be a more suitable description). For these reasons and innumerable others that I can't even begin to recount, roleplay has been one of the most important, necessary, and influential experiences of my recent years.

This begs the question, how can I abandon something so vitally important to me? Is my new life so perfect that I no longer need roleplaying, that I've somehow grown beyond the joy it gave me and now dislike it? The answer is a simple case of time constraints. The effort of earning enough money to meet my cost of living is leaving the spectrum of 'part-time' and heading quickly toward 'full-time'. Twelve credit hours only indicates class time; twice that is necessary each week in order to study properly (which I don't). On top of this, it is important that I maintain a semi-active social life. Though I'm unaccustomed to so much ... human contact without the technological shield of my computer, I've been told repeatedly that social interaction is healthy. (Really, social interaction increases the risk of contracting harmful diseases, but contemporary definitions of 'health' extend beyond the physical condition of the human body.) And I must not that my so-called 'social life' can be quite enjoyable; the interaction wears me down rather quickly, but the experience is overall positive. All of these reasons and more are the ones that monopolize the scant 24 hours of my typical day.

So, what does all this mean in lamenced terms?

▲ 1) I'm so busy every day that I barely have time to eat and sleep, much less do anything fun.
▲ 2) This busyness will probably continue for the rest of the semester.
▲ 3) There's an extremely high chance that I'm gonna have to drop out of roleplaying this semester (this really only affects paradisim_rpg).
▲ 4) I might be on my personal LJ more often once I sort this out, but not nearly as regularly as I used to be.
▲ 5) I'm extremely angry about all of this.

I'm still wracking my brain for alternatives, but nothing looks very promising. It worries me quite a bit; even though I've made improvements in my real life, I sacrificed my internet life in order to do it. No matter what anyone says, my internet life is necessary in order to keep me sane. I can't exactly abandon my internet friends-- hiding from AIM gets more frustrating every day. I miss a lot of people. ;_; And I'm gonna miss roleplaying more than I can express. It'd be like if someone took away all my video games; I can still survive, but I'm going to be extremely miserable.

I don't know. I'm having a lot of trouble making this decision. And for once, I decided to write in my LJ about it.