A cold, serene night​

It’s 0219 and I’m about to pass the latest I’ve ever slept which is 0230 and I honestly have no idea what I’m doing. My brother wanted to swap our sleeping areas (we sleep on the same bed) and now I understand why he can’t fall asleep. The aircon is directly above and this area was closer to the fan. I just couldn’t fall asleep - I left my face exposed and it was too cold, I tried covering myself totally with blankets but it was too hot. I couldn’t reach the perfect coolness. After over two hours, my eyes were dry and dead tired but my body was hyper. I had tried over a dozen sleeping orientations and even slept upside down to no avail. My attempts to use my blanket to block the fan left my body exposed to the cold. Needless to say, it was a complete failure and here I am.

The night is exceptionally quiet and buildings are dark, save some streetlights and buildings. I don’t live near the main road so it’s usually quiet but currently it’s a whole new level of quiet and I’m really enjoying it. With how fast paced life was in highschool, I never really got the opportunity to stop and think about... well, life and other stuff in general. The serenity of the night coupled with my oddly high (but not very) level of adrenaline brings me where I am now. It’s an odd feeling but I do like it though I’m not sure if I can say the same for my body. I’ll just talk about highschool since I haven’t had the time to do so, well not that I’ve had the time to talk about other stuff but this is a nice start.

School and studies​

I’ll just say it right off the bat - school was pretty shit. Not the fees, they’re heavily subsidized here where I’m based but rather the experience. I used to really enjoy school, well elementary school and they probably teach the same way with exams and rote learning, just like in highschool but maybe I was just a few brain cells short of understanding what I was taking in. Even for subjects I didn’t like as much as say Mathematics, I still enjoyed the process of learning (something new). Or maybe school was easier back then.

My first year in highschool. It was just a few months in and I got hit with a brutal failure during the first end of term exams. What’s worse is that it was my favourite subject, Mathematics. I still vividly remember the main topic being vectors. This was quite a shocker since (not to brag but) I’ve never failed math before. I only ever had extra tuition for languages before (Chinese or English) so I’ve never considered it but my mother asked if I’d like math tuition. It was a sure no at first but I couldn’t really stand a failure for math, so from a no, it became maybe, and eventually yes. 2nd tuition, yay(?)

As the year went on, I failed more stuff, never made any friends, never really studied, life was bland and dull. It felt stale, different and pointless. I started to question why I was here, why was I doing what I was doing.

Any parent or teacher or probably even the government would say, get good grades, go to a good university, get a good job, a good work life balance (does that even exist?), retire and enjoy life.

Quite a handful for a promise. I know without hard work I won’t get anywhere, that’s for sure, and I don’t want to work hard for something I’m not going to enjoy. I know, I know, they’ll say but you have to keep your options open - get good grades and you can go anywhere. (Disclaimer: I did not get “good” grades so I can’t refute this, but I’ll just say my experience anyway)

Grey, dark and hopelessness​

Regardless, I didn’t study. The joy of learning was long gone from me, it wasn’t like it was back in elementary school. I started to feel like a robot being mass produced in a factory, operated by robots I was soon to become. Education has become so rigid and stale that it just instantly stood out to me, or maybe I became more aware? They don’t teach about you why you should learn, they teach you what they want you to learn. A rather big contrast from what you want to learn. While what you want to learn may not be optimal due to imperfect information, I still believe we should have the freedom, and even so, schools should start teaching you about the importance of learning. Besides that, I think moving away from boring rote learning is key to enriching learning experiences, spurring students (I don’t particularly like this word) to learn more. Fast forward to the second year and it was pretty much the same as the first. Though, for some reason I started actually trying to get good grades, maybe it was the urgency, the fear that I didn’t have a backup plan if I could not enter university, not wanting to be at a loss if I can’t get into the course I want. I tried studying and it... didn’t go well. As much as I hated studying, hated being a cog in society, I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I studied but nothing was going in, I gradually lost interest in studying (again.) I was so repulsed by large chunks of text that it impacted my reading. When I read anything, I just couldn’t understand the text, no matter how slowly I read. All I saw were letters, I could read words but I couldn’t make anything of them. I read and re-read a dozen times but nothing entered my head. (This was really reminiscent of Your Lie in April, where the main character could play the piano but not hear the sounds.)

By now, I was failing like every subject and so had tuition for every subject. (yes, everything) If you didn’t know, tuition centres really thrive here, so they’re pretty expensive. I didn’t know what to do since I hated burdening my parents with tuition fees. I knew the tuition wasn’t helping especially since literally nothing was going into my brain, but I felt this strong reliance on tuition that I just couldn’t say no. As months went by, I still tried studying, and the stress of knowing that a couple grand a month were being spent for useless tuition started piling on me. I felt utterly hopeless, I told my parents and they didn’t mind (I’m really grateful for this and appreciate it), but it still didn’t relieve my stress. I haven’t worked before, so I don’t really know how hard money is to earn, but I guess really hard.

Just before the preliminary examinations, I was pretty much mentally unstable. I’m a pretty cool guy and don’t have a hot temper but the stress I had got to me. I started to lash out at my parents over trivial matters, I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t fix it. Throughout the preliminary examinations, I felt burnt out, and I was. I tried to feign illness to skip tuition, but even with the free time I felt so lost. I had planned to stop and think about what I wanted to do but nothing came to mind. After the prelims my teacher asked to speak with me and I don’t know why but I just casually said I was burnt out and I basically explained all the stuff I said above while having a mental breakdown, and yeah she was really nice about it.

So I told my parents and they decided to cancel some tuitions, it did help a little bit but not significantly. I still couldn’t find the joy in learning I had lost long ago. Leading up to the actual exams I didn’t study at all, but I didn’t play games either. I just tried to think but I probably was not in the right mind to do so. And well, for the exams my score was the school’s average, so not too shabby, I guess. But for a city that’s so competitive, my dream course (Computer Science) was definitely a no-no. When I got my results about a month ago it didn’t hit me as hard as I expected it to be. I mentally prepared myself to fail every subject but deep down inside, I still had hope that I could get a decent score and make my parents happy, especially after all the care and money they’ve given, and spent on me. I didn’t take the time to reflect so now is a pretty good time.

Redemption arc​

As I've said, with my mediocre grades I probably couldn't get into Computer Science, but that wouldn't stop be from pursuing programming in my free time. Probably coping but every CS course now is basically machine learning, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity which aren't my interests at all. So it wasn't all that bad, but I wasn't sure if it'd be as productive as I wanted it to be. That said, it was still worth a shot. And hey, programming is pretty fun after all. I went online and did some research on computer science courses, took a free one (CS50x), completed it and was pretty satisfied with what I had just learnt and achieved. After that, I went on to write scripts to grind discord bots and sell the currency, for some extra pocket money, and basically botted a few games. It was fun but, started to get boring, especially with how many bans I had amassed after a month or two. Maybe it was fate, but a friend of mine I met online quite a long while ago hit me up and invited me to collaborate on a discord bot, written in Javascript, using Discord.JS. Well that's pretty darn cool, I haven't done much in Javascript so I was wondering if I could even contribute anything, but hey, it's an opportunity to learn a new language so why not?

A day or two had passed and I was still looking through the tens of commands in the existing code and damn were they hard to understand. I was pretty demoralized when I saw the task list and there was nothing I knew how to do. A short while later I was assigned a command similar to an existing one, just serving the opposite purpose. So yes, after some Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V shenanigans, I actually made a command, hooray. It went the same way for the second command, and after working on more feature improvements and new commands, I gradually got to understand the codebase and how it all came together. It was pretty painful but fun, and it kept me occupied so no complaints. I had learnt about databases and structuring code which was pretty cool in my opinion. And after a month or so working on the bot, I decided to pickup new stuff. Javascript seemed really nice to code in compared to python, I love the syntax, but then... I discovered Typescript. Admittedly, it was pretty confusing and seemed unnecessary, but then the convenience of having types allowing mistakes to be found in your code before runtime was a real game changer. I'm currently trying to learn both backend and frontend development, with frameworks like React and it's pretty tough, but interesting.

This "post" kind of turned out to be more of a diary than a blog post, or maybe both, but I think it was nice that I'm able to collect my thoughts here, and mark my progress so I can look back on this post in the future. I definitely don't think I did well at school. Could I have done better? Yes. Would I have done better? Probably not. I am still unable to convince myself that school was fun, even now. But I believe that results definitely aren't everything, and education, the government, anyone else do not get to decide what you can achieve, what you can become. You've probably heard of "it takes two hands to clap", I could probably blame the education system for being awful, and for my results, but I've took pride in my own learning, my own pace, one that was not dictated by school. I've come to realize that I don't need two hands to give myself an affirming pat on the back.