When everything goes wrong; a state also known more generally these days as ‘being alive’; things can feel pretty claustrophobic. Week Five is the culmination of feelings of imprisonment that have been increasing since childhood. It’s possible to feel vaguely free as an eight-year-old when six weeks of summer holiday seems incomprehensibly awesome, or when you run away from home after wounding your sister with a self-fashioned bow and arrow made from bent and sharpened twigs (was that just me?). But freedom means something different to an adult. We’re all willfully suffering the bonds of intellectual slavery here at Cambridge in order to be free at some shady, uncertain point in the future. The interesting thing is, that very same feeling of inkhorn incarceration arises from what is a hugely liberal academic system, one that gives you all the space you need to take responsibility, thoroughly mess up that responsibility, and then to feel guilty for it.

Guilt is a horrible thing but it does serve a beautiful purpose. The dull aching thud of essay-awareness that accompanies you on a guerilla trip to Topshop (because if no-one can see you, you aren’t really wasting time) or the realisation of a drunken mistake the morning after can be downright debilitating as you loathe yourself over a coffee. But wait. Isn’t it these moments of pure self-hatred and blaring life chaos that push you into that weird state of calm and understanding that only arises from stress? Laying on the floor in one of these delicious and delirious states of placidity, I realise that the shuffle on my computer has chosen the Foo Fighters. The album is called “There’s Nothing Left to Lose.” I take this benign sign of empathy from the universe with a smile, realise through sheer proximity that my carpet needs vacuuming and laugh, quite manically, at the distinct lack of time available for such a task.

The secret is, none of us are equipped to deal with anything properly. Instead of concentrating on that, however, we’re terribly good at pretending to have even the tiniest inkling of what’s going on, and failing that, at developing a myriad of ways to say that oh-so-indispensable little phrase: ‘I’m sorry.’ As one of those unfortunate doormat types that apologises to inanimate objects in the event of accidental collisions, these words can see excessive use in my clumsy, flustered little life. But practice does make perfect, and I’ve become increasingly adept at openly recognising my own numerous limitations and flaws. Now that’s a real kind of freedom. If you’ve ever grown frustrated while watching a politician start to sweat as he wriggles and twitches in the glare of a malevolent interviewer, you’ll know that owning up to some monstrosity of bad judgement provides the kind of vulnerability that shows other people that you truly respect and care about them.

So, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise. I rely way too heavily on my supervision partners after ditching the preparatory work, I’m intensely annoying and dishonourable when I’m drunk and I occasionally conjure statistics to prove a point I didn’t really believe in the first place. These things I know, and they’ve got their slot on the infinite to-do list. We can’t avoid the infamous Week Five blues by being superhuman, but let’s use the guilt and desperation fostered by this fact to think outside the box; to free ourselves with an apologetic kind of tampering. Let’s just call it week 4.9, rounded up to something it’s not.

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