Tag: school

Your Life Is Important – Fight For Yourself

When the author was about to give up but life was stubborn and won’t let him go. He learnt to fight for his life.

Do you ever feel that your life isn’t important and you want to just consider that you should just drift into nothingness?

Fight For Your Life : My Story

Well, let me tell you a story.

When I was in high school in class 11, I decided that science was difficult and I wanted to just avoid everything and drift into nothingness.

I used to miss school and play video games all day. 

I also failed in class 11 because of that. 

And then I realized when I was admitted to class 11 again in another school that life isn’t so easy to avoid.

Life’s stubborn and it won’t just let you go and drift into nothingness.

And so what I want to tell you is – your life is important and you should not want to drift into nothingness or avoid life like I did once.

Fight for yourself. Fight for your life. Fight for your survival.

Be Selfish If You Have To

Sometimes it may look “selfish” to want to give importance to your own life.

But that’s okay.

Sometimes being selfish is good. 

And if it is to survive that you’re being selfish then it’s a 100% correct way to act.

Be selfish and affirm your life’s needs. Fight for your life.

Also there has been many other instances of me trying to avoid life. 

But luckily I’m here on the other end of survival – living.

And sometimes I also feel like I’m being selfish for living or trying to survive. 

But to state my needs is necessary and it’s the right thing to do to survive.

“Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities.” 

-Nathaniel Branden, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

And you need to realize that you need to survive and get better.

You need to improve your mental health and you need to fight for yourself.

You’re The Arjuna Of Your Own Life

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna had to fight not just for the Pandavas but also for himself. 

He had to believe in himself. And fight the battle of Kurukshetra.

You are also an Arjuna in your life and the Bhagavad Gita is the words of Lord Krishna. 

But setting aside all philosophical debates, you need to fight for yourself.

You need to fight your battle of Kurukshetra. 

It may not be with swords or bows but it’s definitely true that your life itself is a battlefield where you need to fight by motivating yourself where you are your greatest enemy.

Conclusion

So yeah your life is important and you shouldn’t want to drift into nothingness.

Please please please fight for yourself, with reason, with logic, with your mind, your thoughts, your beliefs but don’t give up. 

Never never never give up!!!

Thank you for reading this line! It means a lot.

Love And Accept Yourself: Don’t Seek Approval From Others

The author writes about his experience if seeking approval from others in the past and realizing the futility in doing it.

Loving Who You Are: No Approval Seeking

Loving who you are is probably one of the most ignored actions of human beings. We want approval from others.

Everybody has insecurities, but we don’t accept them easily.

Instead, we engage in negative self-talk and scold ourselves for being insecure.

We want approval from others but even if they approve of us, we still feel empty.

In my short life, I have been wanting approval and I have realized that if I run after approval and care about what other people think of me, I’ll never truly be happy.

My Story: Birla High School

When I was in class 10, I studied hard to score 84.6%, and then in class 11 I got admitted into Birla High School(BHS), which is one of the most elite high schools in Kolkata and even India as a whole.

Part of the reason I got into BHS was to make my parents proud. 

But I wasn’t proud of myself. 

I got my parents’ temporary approval by getting into BHS, but I didn’t approve of myself.

I still disliked being lonely and I hated myself.

Furthermore, I hated my personality, my lack of confidence, my inability to make friends, my weakness of not being a leader and I didn’t like my stream of subject – science.

Not only that, but I even read multiple self-help books like “Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz to “fix” myself. But nothing worked. 

Because there was nothing to “fix”.

I needed to accept myself.

I needed to tell myself that I loved myself and that I was sorry for hating myself.

And then I needed to change my self-talk.

But I didn’t do any of these actions because I didn’t know how to do them.

I was lost back then.

Conclusion

Today, however, I have started to realize that no matter how much approval I seek, I’ll still feel empty inside.

First I need to accept myself fully.

I need to love myself.

I have an app on my phone called “Finch” and it is a to-do list app for neurodivergent people.

Likewise, I have a to-do item on it that says “Pause and say ‘thank you’ to myself”.

And I find it very soothing to thank myself every day.

So yeah, loving who you are is an underrated skill that everyone should learn.

Thank you for reading this line! It means a lot.

I finally accepted I am not a failure

The author writes about how his preconception that he was a failure because he failed in school was wrong. It wasn’t his failure to begin with, it was society’s failure.

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.

My Hardest Decision: Overcoming Anxiety To Pass My Exams

Daily writing prompt
What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?
View all responses

The hardest decision that I ever made was to trust my parents when they forced me to take the class 12th board exams despite my mental illness.

I had been mentally ill in 2017. And I was admitted to NIMHANS(National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences), Bangalore for 2-3 months and came back to Howrah.

And I was so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed or take a bath properly.

Plus I was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder(BPAD).

And I think it was one of those days when my parents were really worried about me.

So they forced me to take the practicals and board exams of class 12.

I remember when our car reached the school I was feeling very scared. I thought that I couldn’t take the practicals. And yet my parents forced me to go to school and take them.

I performed pretty badly but passed. And I remember I couldn’t answer some of the viva questions.

And in the board exams I performed okay.

I passed my class 12th board exams in 2018 without dropping any year.

And for this I am grateful to my parents.

If they hadn’t forced me to take the exams I wouldn’t be here completing my MBA graduation.

If they hadn’t been there for me, I might have dropped out of school. But it was because of them that I was able to take the exams and pass out of school.

So this was my hardest decision I’d even had to make. To trust someone else more than how much I trusted myself.

Thank you for reading this line. It means a lot.

Good old days’ memories make me laugh

What makes you laugh?

When I was in secondary school, class 10, I had a lot of fun with my friends.

We had to go to multiple private tutor classes and we travelled by bicycle throughout town.

We stole money from our parents and feasted on good food.

We wasted time playing video games.

We studied together.

I had a crush. More about that later 😉.

But recalling the memories of those days makes me laugh.

Not because they were precious but because I know I can never have them back.

Now they are gone.

Those innocent days are of the past.

I feel lucky to have lived such a life even if it’s for a short period of time.

I am grateful.

I’m glad you’re reading this. Thanks a lot!

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