So, I had a week to submit a paper that I had to write on the Biafran-Nigerian civil war, and I spent the week following the schedule that I'd made. When it came to Monday (the day the paper was due) I looked at it and realized that it was junk. Worthless. And I didn't have time to re-write it... so I pieced together some of the articles that I had gotten my information from and gave that to my writing instructor. When it got to the lesson I started feeling dizzy and sick to my stomach about the whole thing and so I admitted the truth (even the she didn't ask about it at all). Now she is ashamed of me, my family is ashamed of me, and I am dead-shamed of myself and I feel like a failure. None of my siblings have ever cheated on anything and neither had I and now I don't think my family will ever trust me again. I feel disgusting and I just about hate myself. I've been told by a friend that it's not the end of the world... but to be honest I wish it were.

I though piecing together information you look up is writing a paper,?

You are making way too much out of a minor issue.

It sounds as though you took pieces from the articles word for word and turned them in as your own. You owned up to it, which is more than most people would do. That took courage and you showed that you were willing to take responsibility for your actions, even knowing it would cause upset. Yes, now some people are disappointed, and you are as well, but you have learned a valuable lesson from it too. They will move passed it, as will you.

All you can do now is apologize for your mistake in judgement and make the decision that it won't happen again. For any future papers, start on them sooner so that you have time along the way, or at the end, to revise if you feel the need to.

People make mistakes, learning from them changes them into lessons.