I’ve always grown up under the preface that I am never good enough.
Self-created and fed, I suppose. I always loved when the people around me praised me and enjoyed what I did, even if I didn’t. If my parents were happy, and my teachers were happy, then logically speaking, I would be as well, right?
No, not exactly.
My entire self-esteem and worth were governed by how I performed academically. Anything less than an A meant disappointment, not because of the stigmatic “asian fail” (though perhaps in some dimension), but because I just wasn’t good at anything else; not particularly talented in any field. I played the piano, but I definitely wasn’t the next Mozart. My artistic talents were decent but incomparable to anything people deemed worthwhile. Sports were distant planets and I was most definitely earthbound. Somehow, I had it drilled into my void-filled head that this was the only way I could measure up.
It’s this kind of mentality that really eats away at you, you know? I was always, always searching for recognition from other people. I became a monster, fed by praise and on an insatiable diet of public approval that created the illusion of a swollen belly to hide my breaking heart. It didn’t matter to me whether or not these were things I truly desired; if that A+ was meant for society, or for me. Occasionally, I would be moved by things – promises that my happiness depended on no one but myself and that if I were to do things that they should only fulfill my desires. And I tried, I tried really hard to believe in them. But when you’ve had a state of mind implanted within your very way of existence for your entire life, you can’t expect it to go away that quickly.
Slowly though, beginning in the later years of my high school career, I began to change in my way of thinking. The details are blurry – when, how and why are unclear, but I guess my soul was tired. It was still difficult to grasp, even more so to explain to the people around me that the conceptual image that they had of me within their minds wasn’t real. That the people you love are the very same who destroy you.
It’s still a work in progress. No matter how hard I try, I think a lacklustre grade will always hit a nerve before I try and dissipate the feeling of disappointment and “should’ve’s” and “could’ve’s” inside me. It’s still hard to explain to my parents that I’ve realized school is a place to learn and improve, rather than a place to milk out a degree and as much scholarship funding as possible, that achieving constant perfection in my academics isn’t always going to happen. That it’s okay to take it slow as long as you’re moving. It’s even harder when you’re still struggling to come to terms with the matter.
I’m learning that in the end, my degree is simply a piece of paper that tells you where I got it from and what I was interested in, but not the kind of person I am or have been. It tells you all the positives: I’ve officially graduated from an established university and I’ve worked hard. It doesn’t tell you about my insecurities – that I constantly fluttered between worthless and worthwhile; that I used to look at skyscrapers and wondered which would be most pleasant to fall from. And it’ll never tell you about the person I want to be, that I have galactic visions of star clouds and moon diamonds when I know faithfully well I am wholly terrestrial.
And maybe, I will dare you to ask me why I treat my degree as paper so that I can tell you, perhaps inaudibly, that paper can be burned and turned into ash but my dreams are made of fire.
