There are times when you give your all, but nothing comes out of it. There are times when you expect, things happen the other way around. And there are times you learn to have faith, just to get it destroyed within a second before it was fully built up.
As I buried my face in the palms of hands, feeling miserable, again, a flashback of me, staying up all night, giving my all, crossed my mind. It was probably because of my period nearing, as I tried to convince myself that I am allowed to feel like jumping off a high building and hit a cold, hard brick floor. Of course, the tears came after, and I felt even worse crying and getting all depressed because I didn't do well on my exams all because of one, silly mistake. I wrote the wrong number.
I hurried over to my bed and flopped down, letting all the sadness wash over me, overwhelm me and tried my very best to keep going, keep having faith in God. I turned my head and faced the Bible placed at the corner of my bed, just beside my pillow, to a little right of where my head was. I closed my eyes and sobbed even more. And I think I cried even harder just realising that I don't really want to tell anyone about this, not wanting them to know my "failure".
Since when have I turned into someone so discouraged?
I cried a little over an hour, and I slept a little. When I woke up, my face were sticky from the dried up tears droplets, and my heart was a little less devastated. There was so much that had happened since I hit university, and I just don't know how to swallow it all. I don't know what was "me" and "not me" anymore. Everyone in lectures seems distant, I could not blend in well, and all these just made me work and get immersed on my exams instead. So when I could not even do well in the last thing I had hope of making me feel a little bit better about being who I am in university, I was beyond devastated. My family was struggling with their very own problems, my long time best friends were as busy as I am with assignments and tests, my university friends are not exactly my friends, so in the end I'm just left with me, myself and I, and my faith towards Christianity.
However, just like any other human being, when you try to depend or rely on something for once, spiritual or physically, and you end up not getting what you expected or not getting what you think you deserved, you lose faith, you lose motivation. For me, I lost sight of what I was working so hard of, my CGPA? My future? The perception of others towards me? Or the perception I get of myself?
All these questions never bothered or even crossed my mind when I was in secondary school, and maybe that was because I was still young, and never really know anything of worth to be categorized as a "struggle of life" or anything that I perceived as a "struggle" or "hardship" were just probably a "small hole". Today, as I stared at my computer screen that shows the correct working steps to the exam I've done yesterday, I realized that, "Wow, shit, Alicia, this is a struggle" or "Damn, you could had done better" or "If you just wrote the correct numbers..." But what came after that realization was, after a few years of my graduation, I'd be looking over this memory, describing this experience as a "small hole" and commenting all I've commented now about whatever rough patch I would be in when I hit the working life.
See, this is growing up. I remember one of my very good friend, who grew up close with me and got separated when we applied to different college, asked me this back when we were seventeen,
"What do you think is meant by living?
The me back then told him that living was to be happy, and to do what you want and love.
The me today learnt that living, is not just merely being happy and to do what you want and love, it is to do what you want and love, despite being unhappy. There's a few more points though : Living is to learn that sometimes, everything to us is not everything, and living it to learn that not everything that matters to us now, matters forever. Living is truly knowing that what the world was able to give us, does not define our worth, the things that we think we deserved, does not define our validity. Living is not holding onto things and making it flow and glow in the way we plan, expect or hope for. Living is a lot of things. But mostly, living is taking the risk.
To summarize it all up, I stared at the mistakenly written numbers on the scanned answer sheet displayed on my computer screen, and thought to myself that, at the age of twenty, I am still in a process of growing up, and a lot of people understood this as "maturing" or "being wise", but honestly, it is really just "towards who you wanna be". A lot of people took growing up as needing to live with your mistakes and failures and normalize it as a part and parcel of life. And I am telling you that growing up is understanding that it is okay, and it is fine, to make mistakes and going back to square one. It is okay to hit a dead end after running for so long. What isn't okay is to destroy the worth of your effort because of the dead end.
What isn't okay is to forget who you are and why you are you.
Don't let what success is to others become your own measure of success, and don't let what is normalize by others to let you think that you too, should normalize them, even if you don't agree to it. Don't let yourself be them, and don't let their opinions on failures to be you.
Let me also phrase another gift of words from one of my close friend as well,
"If you don't like how you are being treated, get up and leave. If you don't like where you are now, get up and leave. It is not worth being unhappy living the way that isn't you".
Love,
Alicia. <3
