Passing With Flying Colors
Like roughly 80% of my classmates, I struggled academically, and the ones who did well never let me forget it. My father held a Class 1 officer ranking and cared a great deal about how our family looked to others, so he kept pushing me to do better. When 11th grade came and I had to pick a focus, I went with science. I had no real interest in it. I went along because that was what he wanted. His plan was for me to become an engineer. Mine involved the performing arts: I pictured myself hosting radio shows or acting.
The first stretch of 11th grade went fine. I showed up, listened in class, and tried to hold onto whatever the teachers put in front of me. About two weeks in, my attention started slipping, and the reason was plain enough. The material bored me. Computer class was the one hour that broke the monotony. I took to computer science without much effort, and my marks there stayed high, probably because I'd been playing computer games since I was three. The fundamentals already felt like second nature. So I drifted through the rest of my schedule barely cracking a book on my core subjects.
My friends fretted over their coursework while I lived in my own little bubble, right up until the mid-terms landed. I did badly. Four of my core subjects came back as failures. My computer course, meanwhile, earned me the top grade in the room. My father found out. He shouted at me and hit me, and when I tried to tell him I genuinely couldn't follow most of what those classes were teaching, none of it registered with him.
The anger I felt toward him didn't change anything between us. I spent my days sinking into a kind of hopelessness, convinced I'd flunk the finals and that he'd throw me out of the house. What began as a low mood slid into something heavier. There was a girl in my class who was brilliant at everything, and I kept my distance from her, sure she'd mock me for my grades.
At one point I stopped going to school for fifteen days straight, dreading what the others would say about me. She showed up at my house to find out what was going on. Her first move was to pressure me into coming back the next day, and I handed her every excuse I could think of. Half an hour later she'd had enough. She told me something I hadn't expected: she hadn't always been the star student. There was a time when she'd done poorly too, and she'd found her own way through it.
What she said next stuck with me. She told me that what we love isn't handed down to us by fate, and that I'd be better off pouring my energy into the subjects that actually pulled at me. I started studying with her after our normal classes, and things slowly turned around. Once I believed I could handle the work, I kept at it until every big concept finally clicked.
Then the finals arrived. I was scared about whether I'd make it through, so I tried a different approach: I started thinking of my parents as friends rather than judges, and I let myself believe I could do this. When the results came out, I had passed with flying colors. The grades mattered, but what mattered more was realizing I'd underestimated what I was actually able to do.