You’re in a rectangular room with a raised platform upfront. The door is to the left of the platform. There are those single chairs with flaps for writing dotted across the classroom. It is lit in bright white light—good for visibility but it feels like you are in a hospital. The class is almost full, some students pay attention, most are secretly scrolling Instagram under the tables. You decided to pay attention today so you sat on the first table. Your teacher/lecturer/professor walks in and they start introducing the topic.
You get excited, your pen is already bleeding ink in the shape of a dot on the paper. You start making notes. Five minutes pass. So far so good.
At minute nine, your teacher says something that you do not quite understand. You raise your hand to ask your doubt. They explain. You nod your head pretending to understand because you do not want to appear stupid. You make a note next to that point: revisit.
At the 15 minute mark you wonder about whether you have seen the teacher’s kurta before. Was it something you own? Have they repeated their outfit? Was it your aunt who had this kurta.
FOCUS!
Shit, two minutes have gone by. You have lost track what was going on but you quickly reorient yourself. The exhaustion is starting to set in. Your brain is itching to turn off and do other things, but you will yourself to focus.
At some point you are on autopilot. You are jotting down words but they mean nothing to you. You tell yourself that you can revise later. You stifle a yawn, you eyes are getting droopy. The AC is lulling you to sleep. Your brain feels like it is fudge. The teacher’s voice is fading into the background like radio static.
FOCUS!!!
You snap back to reality. You take a sip of the water next to you. It is minute 40. You realise you have completely lost the plot. What’s the point now? You say to yourself, and start absentmindedly doodling in your notebook. You are now desperately waiting for the lecture to end.
The minutes pass by mind-numbingly slowly and you really want to go back to bed.
Finally, relief. The electric bell buzzes. You make a note to revisit this lecture, these topics so you are up to speed with the contents of the class. You promise yourself that the next lecture will be different, you will not zone out.
Except you do. Again, and again and again. By the end of the day, you are completely spend from trying so hard to focus and failing to do so, despite your best efforts.
In fact, you are so spent that when you go back home, studying is the last thing you can do. You try, for the first few days of the semester you sit in front of your notebooks and textbooks, but nothing makes sense to you.
- Because your notes are incomplete
- Because the notes you have, you cannot recall the context
- Because piecing them together feels like completing a jigsaw puzzle where more than half of the pieces have gone missing
You force yourself to go through the textbooks, but at the first sight of a challenge, you get demotivated. It feels like an uphill battle, except the hill is like a vertical wall with no footholds. Instead of sitting through the discomfort and exhaustion, you get anxious and do something that will be more rewarding.
Why the anxiety? You wonder. Because you know that you will be tested on the basis of what you learn. You will have to mug things up that do not completely make sense to you. You have very little time to learn these things because you are slow at grasping new concepts. You feel stupid and worthless.
This doesn’t happen in every subject though. You breeze through some subjects because you instinctively connect to the subject matter, and the teacher actually makes an effort. You barely have to do the readings to get above average grades, because the teacher tests you on conceptual clarity and the lectures are quite easy to follow. And when they are not, the teacher is patient with you.
But the truth is you never end up developing the discipline required to learn. You only learn when it comes to you easy. You give up far too quickly and you have little to no stamina to push through the boredom and exhaustion of formal education.
You barely make it through your undergraduate degree. No one thought you would graduate, including you. You are ashamed of your GPA. After the initial joy of graduating subsides, you feel like an utter failure. You have a degree but you have retained nothing. If tomorrow, someone asks you a basic question about the subject you studied, you wouldn’t be able to answer. It feels like you wasted three crucial years of your life and an exorbhitant amount of money just for a piece of paper.
You do not understand who is at fault… is it the system? Or is it you?
Fast forward to your job! You go into it with very low self-esteem. You have decided to fake it till you make it because you feel like an imposter. You truly have no faith in your ability to learn. You are constantly scared of getting fired. You are always anxious. Any sign of unhappiness from your manager gets you terrified. Your brain is like a minefield. There is no escape to this hell.
But things are different. Your manager, he sits with you. He explains the same concept to you again and again and again. You also start trusting yourself more. Every time you get something right, you feel a tad bit more sure of yourself.
You force yourself to sit through the challenging bits, because your income depends on it. And eventually, slowly and steadily—you get a hang of it.
You make many mistakes… oh so many mistakes! Some historical fuck ups. But your manager doesn’t get angry at you. He gives you the space to grow and learn from them. He really does.
You are experiencing new things: sitting through discomfort, boredom, everything you ran away from before. You even manage to sit through full fledged panic attacks. You eventually receive employee of the month. Sure, in the grand scheme of things it means jack. It means jack considering this is your orgs way of not monetarily compensating their employees. But to you, it means the world! It is proof that you have the potential to take on challenges, and perform well.
You finally feel ready to re-enter formal education. You decide that this time it will be different. You will sit through everything.
You recognise that lectures will be difficult and exhausting, but you will still do your best to focus. You acknowledge that sitting in one place and studying will be an uphill battle, but it is not a vertical slope. It is merely steep. And you are capable of scaling it.
Finally you let yourself be slow. You promise yourself that you will not judge yourself too harshly for being slow at grasping things. For taking longer to remember concepts. For taking longer to form opinions.
You still haven’t decided if it is the system that sucks, or you. But it will matter less this time.