Life here in Britain is starting to speed up for me. I've finally returned to classes after the long summer break.

Admittedly, everyone else returned a month ago, so there was some confusion when I showed up. But I reminded them of the Marshall Plan and all was forgiven. No, not really.

The British academic year seems to run a bit shorter than those back home and still manages to pack in equal or greater amounts of terror. I think it has something to do with the exchange rate; which, of course, has something to do with the price of oil in China. If the Chinese start taking more road trips, the British academic year will be reduced to just one month of being yelled at by a man in a tweed jacket.

This being my second year of university, I am trying to tell myself that I am somehow better prepared for the challenges ahead, but I have trouble actually believing that. As indicated by the number of depressing columns I wrote about failure, last year was not an easy one. I can't help feeling that I simply survived my first year here, much in the way one might survive going over Niagara Falls.

Now I'm back in the academic barrel and not feeling any more confident. I am driven more by a sense of inevitability than anything else. I kicked and pushed to put myself on this three-year path -- there's nothing to do but carry on forward.

To be fair, it's not a bad life. I live in a pretty country where people are relatively nice to me, health care is free and I'm getting to do what I had spent the last decade or so saying I wanted to do. I'm not very likely to become the subject of a Lifetime movie (which is unfortunate, because I think Judith Light would be great at portraying my mom).

And perhaps the lack of actually bad things in life is what I find so terrifying: If I screw up, I don't have anyone or anything to blame. At the moment, there are no barriers but for the ones that are self-created. The idea of having to complete this task unhindered is kind of scary.

That sounds totally ridiculous, doesn't it? The healthy middle-class white man's cross to bear is his absence of a cross. But I think there's some truth to it. Sometimes the hardest tasks are those that no one's stopping you from doing.

My wife is a dietitian, and one of the first things she will tell you about nutrition is that there is no secret code to eating. There is no pill, no program, no book, no guru that will make it all better. The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to eat intelligently. Pay attention to the things that go into your mouth. That's not hard, is it?

Of course it's hard. It is impossibly hard for people all across the socio-economic scale. Fellow columnist J. Scott Wilson is just one of the millions of Americans who have found themselves fighting a constant war against weight, and he's shared his experiences online through his "Diary of a Fat Man."

But no one is forcing Scott to eat. I've met him in person; he's about 7 feet tall. No one in their right mind would try to force him to do anything. His battle with weight over the past three years has been internal.

I've been lucky in life not to ever have to worry about weight. But I remain a banana republic of internal struggle, with the greatest battle being waged over academics. Food is not my addiction, wasting time is. Facebook is my chocolate pie.

The strongest people are sometimes the ones with the internal strength to do things that no one's making them do. What wakes me up at night is the fear that I'm not that strong.

Although, I don't wake up in a cold sweat as much as I used to. Perhaps the experience or survival or outright luck of getting through the first year is actually paying off. Despite my lack of confidence, somewhere in the back of my head, a little voice says: "You've made it through one year. So, it's at least possible that you'll make it through this one."

Then the voice says: "Let's watch 'Smokey and the Bandit' on DVD. Again. We can put off studying for a few hours."

It's going to be an interesting year.

Chris Cope lives with his wife in Cardiff, Wales. His column appears every other Tuesday.