It is the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

 

I wrote this yesterday, and I feel this would make a really good anniversary post. So here we go, onward to the third year of "As I'm Suffering from Thinking."

As I try to process through the cultural significance of ‘no study day’ today, I experienced the slightest hint of an answer to the question above. Thinking about the statement, a part of me wants to agree with it without any arguments. But a case without evidence would never be interesting.

To begin with, the mere thought of writing this essay today was exciting; what would happen if you use your brain on its rest day? A conflicting thought in terms of faith, but I’ve seen people do this before. So, to the child in me, writing today is a dream come true.

But the part of me that left my innocence behind forces me to speak otherwise. To adults, the failures a teen faces would not be failures at all; in fact, they would call it ‘experience'. When a teen who has just left her childhood behind yearns for something so hard and loses it, the amount of dejection she goes through is immense for her age. People expect teens to get back on track and hit again, yet they fail to realize that a broken limb will not have the same dynamics. This change in dynamic is what makes life interesting for a teen.

Or so did I think, until writing the previous section. A change in the background aesthetic and a quick glimpse at my trophy case makes me question myself again. Why did I present myself to be criticized so many times? The world is abstract, there is no absolute scale to either measure or compare. Yet the mere thought of winning, or to be frank, being declared as the best among a fraction of humankind, gave me an adrenaline rush. The photo of me standing on the stage with a microphone gets my brain humming to my heart’s beat, and the sweet memories of victory that kept me going.

Among those photos are also the ones where I failed. And those taught me a lot. I still remember the first time I failed in a writing contest: the 13 y/o me broke down as soon as she saw her fail. I cried the whole way long; the driver was confused. When I told him, he said something that I would never dare to forget in my life; “Success doesn’t teach you the pain of failure.” At that point in time, it wasn’t comforting, and you can’t expect a thirteen-year-old to get over it soon.

But those words rang over and over again at many stages thereafter. At some point, I analyzed the pain I went through during a failure. And the next time, I succeeded. To me, at sixteen, going through my journal entries of failures invokes a contradicting feeling to this essay; it is your reaction to the pain you endure before success that makes your life interesting.

 I could be wrong, then again, the way a teen perceives a happening is unique to her persona, right? You might not know what the result of my previous presentation was. But here I am, presenting myself to be criticized again. “Am I doing this because of a success, or a failure?” This, my dear reader, is for you to answer.