For every student who thinks they aren’t good enough.
This blog is not a motivational blog. It’s not a blog that feeds you lies and lies till the adrenaline is tearing its way through your veins and your desire to succeed is renewed. It’s not a blog that chirps ‘you can do it!’ like an irritating alarm clock with a snooze button more dishevelled than my hair in the morning.
It’s a blog that says ‘you will do it.’ That it sucks, but you will. It’s just a matter of how and when.
Pause the movie of the unfolding contents of my life, and rewind a couple weeks.
2 WEEKS EARLIER:
I sat on my beanbag, laptop half open with a violet tinted screen staring back at me.
My ChatGPT was open, alongside NotebookLM, Duolingo, and 7 loading files, my brain a bullet train ripping through air, running at 320kmph, too used to pushing to stop.
Tests.
The worst word for most school students. The dreaded, ominous word. And lucky for me, mine were approaching. Rapidly.
I spent the night cramming.
(a+b)2=a2+2ab+b2
Fire acts as both symbolism and self-juxtaposition in Fahrenheit 451.
Dinner? Thanks, mom. No, I’ll have it in 10 minutes.
Usamos el pretérito indefinido cuando describimos un evento que ocurrió en el pasado, que tiene unos inicio y fin definidos.
Correct the grammar, Guneeva, correct the grammar.
Huh, what? Yeah, sure. I’ll be in bed by 9:00. I promise you, mom.
Uniform velocity is when a body travels equal distances in equal windows of time with the same direction.
Germany conquered Namibia in 1883 when Adolf Luderitz signed a treaty with Namibian leaders.
It’s 9:30 and I still haven’t had my dinner? Just give me 10 minutes. Homework? I’ll do it in the car tomorrow morning.
What was I studying again?
The days passed in a blur of words and numbers, facts and stats. I was a numb vessel of a person, perfunctorily studying and eating and sleeping and breathing but barely living.
The Red Queen once declared, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “My dear, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” She may have been a psychopathic, eccentric antagonist, but she was not wrong. Far from it.
The days were dragging by and the nights felt all too short. I was exhausted.
1 WEEK EARLIER:
The classroom was a noisy mess.
You know the cliche movie classroom? The one where paper planes are flying and everyone’s yelling and someone’s standing on a table and somebody’s shooting spitballs at somebody else? Multiply that with 10. Then imagine how much worse it can get. That’s what the class of 8A looked like.
There was screaming. There was hyperventilating. There were cult-like groups of people trying to psychically absorb knowledge from the notebook.
The air smelled like stress, sweat, and imminent failure, and I was struggling to find real oxygen among it.
I swiftly walked into the corridor and got a lungful of the brisk, silent air. I cleared my head, steadied my heartbeat, and walked right back in.
The chaos still hadn’t changed, only increased. Exponentially.
I took my seat, grabbed my good pen, shoved my notebooks into my locker, and waited.
And sure enough, when the teacher walked in, it was like pausing a movie. An uncomfortable silence settled like a veil over the classroom.
The only sound to be heard was the rustling of paper, the soft click of pens and panicked breathing of those who were absolutely clueless.
50 minutes later, I turned the paper in, my name signed in black ink on the top. And the second the teacher stepped out of the room, the movie unpaused, and the screaming resumed once more. I couldn’t help but sigh.
A FEW DAYS EARLIER:
Our first corrected papers were lying in our teacher’s bag, and the class waited with bated breath.
It was distributed swiftly — our teacher was wise not to keep us waiting, for the anxiety was tearing us apart.
The white, ruled sheet sat in my hand. Black pen ticked with red pen, my pristine font overwritten with a scrawny handwriting that deserves to belong to a doctor.
Numbers, circled, looming above all.
I saw the world around me freeze in motion.
One of my friends was grimacing. Another was hiding a carefully concealed smile. The third looked like they’re about to cry. The last one didn’t even bother to be modest, and their radiating joy broke through my trance.
I slipped my paper into a sleeve of my folder, picked up my lunchbag, and walked out of the classroom.
One of my dearest friends barged into me at such a velocity I winced. Their eyes were puffy, breaths were ragged, and they grabbed my wrist and dragged me to a corner.
“Oh my God.” They exhaled. “I absolutely—” they paused to use some colorful vocabulary “—failed. My parents are going to kill me.”
Watching them erupt into a waterfall of tears shattered my heart.
My test lay in my own backpack, and it looked smug. Proud. Like the sole purpose of it was to ruin lives, not better them. Like it made kids cry and laughed while it was at it.
I had some colorful vocabulary in mind for that sheet myself.
But instead, I squeezed my friend’s shoulder, walked them to the bathroom, and said with a wink. “Wait for my blog.”
RIGHT NOW:
Though I often delve into my personal philosophies, I don’t write this blog as a preachy, high and mighty know-it-all offering world-class advice.
I write this as someone who’s cried at bad grades, dealt with emotional friends and parents and teachers whose disappointment hurt far more than their anger. I write this as someone who gets it. And my advice is barely world class. It’s advice that worked true for me and might make your life a whole lot better too:
Accept the truth.
You screwed up in an exam.
You performed poorly, and either you’re disappointed in yourself or worried how others would evaluate you because of it.
And now you’re reading this blog because you want to be pushed to be better.
But the power to evolve lies in only one person. That person is you.
And when you unlock that, there’s no stopping you.
So, no. This is not a motivational blog. It is an affirmation, a consolation, a reminder that you’re not alone. It is an acceptance that you didn’t do well, and a reminder that you certainly will next time if you try hard enough.
It is the key to your intrinsic motivation, the path to getting there yourself, the right way.
You have the key. Go open the floodgates. The wellspring of determination coming from yourself will never run dry.
It is the best gift that I can give you.
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