Even if no one would care to read this, I would like to share my story, even if it's to the void it's

ok.

When I was in elementary school, I was just an average kid, nothing special, not talented or anything.
But one day, my English teacher suddenly told me that I had a great English accent for a non-native
speaker. That encouragement suddenly sparked something in me and helped me tremendously in
improving my language skill.

Until 6th grade, when I got accepted in a prestigious middle school in my area. I got into my head and I
immediately fell off bby 7th grade. But I resented myself for that. I resented myself for being bad at the
only thing that I'm good at. So from that point on, I trained. Everywhere I went, I always carried a
dictionary with me. My friends used to call me "Retard" just because of how I threw my entire social life
away just to learn English. And I did it. I rose to the top, not the very best but I have a respectable
standing in terms of English skills. But I traded everything in my life for it. As I deemed being good at
English my life's sole purpose, I have traded off a happy childhood to attain it.

And everything suddenly collapsed when I reached 12th grade. My country holds a national competition
annualy and English is one of the subjects. I failed. I didn't get anything to compensate for my effort at
all. I remembered I was allowed to skip school entirely for around 2 months and in those 2 months, I
would spend 8 hours everyday just for English alone. But my score was worse than my best friend, who
just skipped school to play video games all day. What's worse is not only how many things I have to give
up to achieve it, but I'm not even remotely appreciated. The I failed my exam, I was very depressed and
went out for a walk. I remembered just wanting someone to hug me at that time. When my mom and
godmother was really worried about me, I felt weirdly happy. But when I returned home, the first word
my dad said to me was

: " He probably wondered somewhere near home"

, which wasn't true. And the thing that hit me the hardest was:

"Were you to be the son of another household, they would've beaten the shit out of you for being so
terrible."

When I heard those words, all I could do was laught it off. I went to bed and resumed my normal
schedule for the next day. Looking back, I probably had to bear it because the national college test
(something like gaokao in China but smaller in scale).

I finally did it. I got accepted into one of the most prestigious business school in the country.
Everything's going to be easier for me they said. But no, everything came crashing down. As I thought
my life was gonna get easier, booom. I joined a club in school and one of the very first thing they forced
me to do was to be the sole video editor in a group project, be too demanding and made my workflow
hell. I spent 12 consecutive hours everyday for 3 days both learning how to edit and edit the video itself
just becaues I'm the only one who knew anything about Premiere Pro. And then the group leader just
straight up insulted my work by saying that I have to redo EVERY section of the video.

It's from this point that I finally start to close myself off. From July 2021 to March of 2022, I had virtually
no contact with anyone other than my family. My best friend from the times when I was competing in
the national English thing? Gone. My crush with whom I took a lot of courage to invite her to bike with
me? Gone. I just became a nobody. Those 8 months was hell to me. I was constantly in pain, I can't even
be bothered to get up from bed for days straight. I just left everything behind. It's not healthy, and I
damn sure know it isn't, but what am I supposed to do when everything around me is just as equally
unhealthy. I was miserable because my old life crept up to me. I was miserable because as I thought that
I escaped that life, it just returned. The life where I would work days, weeks, months just to get nothing
worthy in comparison to my effort. But this time, the thing that finally made me break was because I did
not choose to do it.

It's been 8 months now, and I think I'm way better now. I'm talking to the girl that i had a crush on (the
biking girl). I tried to initiate a conversation with her and reconnnected with my old friends who were
worried about me quite a bit. I'm glad that they still care about me, but it didn't make me that much
happy. What really made me happy now is discovering what I can do now. I'm spending qutie a lot of
time learning Blender and motion design, and I chose to do it. Not because it's my life's only purpose,
not because I was forced to learn them, but I just like them. And I think that doing what I truly like just
made me happy. All of these feelings pent up inside me, I couldn't say them aloud, as I don't know how
to express them. But thanks to you, Mr CuddlyWhisker, I can finally tell people the story of me now.

Of course, it would've been a much different story were my preference to be substance abuse rather
than discovering myself. But this is a cool life mantra.

Thanks for paying attention to a random stranger. Cheers.