I don’t remember when or why I wanted to become the best. I’ve come to believe that that’s just how my brain was programmed from the start.

The idea of my name with a shiny, bright No. 1 next to it put a smile on my face. The standardized tests, the successful competitions, the stack of As on my report card, and the red stamped stars on the back of my hand satisfied my little 6-year-old brain. After all, who doesn’t enjoy succeeding?

From then on, I just wanted to keep winning. As they say, sky’s the limit.

The goal was to be the smartest person ever. (Sky’s the limit, remember?) Think naming and knowing the locations of all of the countries in the world, mentally solving any math problem thrown at you, understanding every molecular process happening in your surroundings, being fluent in 12 languages—I desired to be a prodigy, like those whiz kids in the advertisements.

It was more fascinating the younger you were, so the pressure I put onto myself to do great things at the young age of 9 was like carrying 10 elephants on my pinkie finger.

Unrealistic

An unrealistic standard, it really was. Over the years, I felt like a failure for never doing anything even a fraction as groundbreaking as people who were years and degrees ahead of me. Can you imagine a 12-year-old feeling frustrated because they haven’t found the cure to Alzheimer’s disease yet?

What once was the source of my drive and ambition became a sort of self-sabotage mechanism. I was thankful for my desire to be great, it was my fuel to keep going and to keep achieving, but almost all things come double faceted. Despite me being at my best, I was convincing myself that everything I had been doing wasn’t enough.

It was a weird mix of guilt, disappointment, anger and envy. I felt guilty and disappointed that I wasn’t doing enough, I was angry that I wasn’t good enough, and I envied those who I wanted to become.

I beat myself up for every score that I didn’t deem satisfactory, revising past tests and checking what I could have done differently. There were times when I couldn’t even look at my own papers; I felt it was too embarrassing.

Sixth grade, undoubtedly the lowest point in my pressure-to-be-great pipeline, was cut short by the pandemic. Days that turned into weeks that turned into months, were spent indoors with no academic pressure whatsoever. I spent a long time trying to keep myself entertained while in lockdown, revisiting old hobbies, falling back in love with things that used to hold special places in my heart, learning new things about the world, and about myself.

With the time I spent alone, I have discovered healthier means of continuous goal-achieving. I started playing the guitar again, I rekindled my passion for writing, and found a delightful escape in reading.

And as school rolled back around, I had accepted that I wasn’t always going to be the best, and that it was perfectly OK if I wasn’t. My pure, unmitigated love for learning has returned, and the great scores and awards I receive are merely reminders for me to keep loving it.

The author is an incoming Grade 9 student at De La Salle Zobel.