When I was in class 11 I had failed one year and I was detained in the same class.
And I had been carrying the burden on my shoulders that I was a failure.
I had never introspected if it was indeed true that I had failed.
Last night I was journaling and I realized that it was not my failure.
But it was someone else’s failure.
It was society’s failure.
I was trying my best to survive but it was society who had failed me.
I was trying out a socratic method of introspection with the guidance of Claude AI.
And it turned out that I was studying physics, chemistry, computer science and maths because my parents told me to.
Not because I wanted to.
I felt as if I was learning something I found strange.
I felt stupid and as if it was a waste of my time.
I felt sad and stressed. I felt tired of all the traveling to school, coaching classes, and tutors.
And yet I didn’t understand those subjects.
I felt, “If the world is so difficult, I don’t want to live in a difficult world.”
I couldn’t sit down to study.
I played videogames 16 hours a day from morning till midnight.
I slept less, ate irregularly and didn’t study.
I avoided everything.
And I was also reading so many self-help books to help me figure out what was wrong with me.
My psychologists said that nothing was wrong with me. But I believed something was wrong with me.
I wasn’t having fun while avoiding life, I was trying my best to cope with the sadness and pain and the stress.
And then when I failed I finally felt free.
But this feeling of freedom and relief was short-lived.
I was again back to repeating the year in another school where I took admission.
And somehow I passed high school with the same subjects.
And for a few months I studied engineering at a private university but I dropped out.
And again I got the feeling of relief and freedom.
This time I took a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in philosophy course in college.
But due to some technical problems I had to change my subject to English and I had to drop out.
Then I took a bachelor of business administration course from my last online college.
And I studied it and graduated and took MBA and graduated that too.
But all this while I kept thinking that “I am a failure”.
And boy I couldn’t be so wrong.
I thought that since class 11 was something I experienced and I failed it, I am the failure.
But the truth is it was my parents’ and society’s expectations that made me take physics, chemistry, computer science, maths as subjects.
And if I “failed” that and felt relief, it wasn’t my failure really, it was their failure.
I was never a failure.
I gave my best and I did my best to cope with the stress and sadness.
I read self-help books to find the solution.
But I couldn’t find any.
So it was never my failure.
I was living in someone else’s design of a life.
It wasn’t mine to begin with.
And I also realized that even right now I am living in someone else’s design of my life.
I am living in fear of not getting a job, fear of never making it, fear of not having a comparable income to others.
I am trying to get a data analytics job but all I want to do is write and read and experience the world and share it with you.
I guess I need to work on this aspect now before it’s too late.
But yeah I was never a failure, it wasn’t my failure.
I am not a failure.
Thanks for reading this line! It means a lot.