P.S.

I could not concentrate throughout my 6pm nanostructure class. I have made a point to myself to show up in the class, and not only that, this time, I have gathered all cells spiritually to focus and try to understand what the professor talked about when he pointed the jargon words and some funny shapes of nano objects which so far only made me think of cookies (made by a complete noob).

I was all ready by the time I finished my 4pm class. Got the spirit right, asked my prof a question after 4 pm class. Not that I care, but I need to make myself believe that I care about those stuffs and not that sky color is changing or that the world would stop turning just because of this horrible things inside my mind.

Then I met this girl. She was a classmate in Physics. She was that type of student who were always telling you and showing you how panicked she was because she thought she was not doing well enough with her Physics courseworks, which I tried to tolerate everytime she did that to me. She was a paranoid. Her worries never happened. She had always been a 5.00 GPA student. I am not envious of her at all, because I know she got that by rejecting spending time with me or her other friends for lunch when she didn't feel like it, by cramming and studying all semester and not caring about her friends at all, and I remembered how she refused to share her notes or to teach me things that I did not understand in the lecture that we took together last year.

Fair enough, I do not care much about her. I saw her walking 5 steps towards me, I told myself to looked down and pretended not to see her, but it was too late. She grabbed my hand and said she was  depressed. I was skeptical. Ever since I went to receive treatments and therapy from psychological unit in university clinic last year, I always wanted to look at the person in the eye and asked if she/he really know what he/she was saying. I do not like the term being overused. But I tried to be normal, right. So I just fake a sympathetic smile and offered a listening ear. At least I know, that particular person won't understand what I am going through. Because I knew how it is killing me to shut everything to myself and this blog only. I would talk to her, try to show her how appreciable it was to have someone to listen to your rants.

She was worried that her perfect GPA score would get affected by her thesis, which she thought she had not worked hard enough for. She whined to me that she had just started writing it yesterday. Shit, I have not even started writing anything yet, and I still needed to take some important datas. If she is worried about her GPA, I am worried if I can even pass my modules by this semester after getting a warning letter from the dean's office and one of my tutor. I am a mess now, I understand that she would not feel better for the fact that she is much better than a mess.

I even told her my problems, which I am not proud at all. Not to console her, but to tell her that I am struggling too . That I was like her, I defined myself with my productivity and my achievements and by that measure I am a complete shit right now. Zero self esteem. These were days of failures, failure to understand and remember what I read, sometimes failure even to be courageous enough to face the test or even to show up in the class, failure to study as well as I planned myself to do today and at the end of the day I felt so doomed. Sometimes it was hard to sleep, but it was always hard to get up of the bed and face the day too.

She told me that she must have perfect transcript and records for her grad school application. Come on, it is Physics grad school, people need you there. And if it is research, her supervisor even had told her that her transcript does not matter, my supervisor told so too, those are top profs. So it is not just me saying that. I need a job and I have a very awful transcript. I told her that I tried to keep in my mind that my transcript did not identify who I am, which I still found hard to swallow, but I had to sound convincing to her. She even asked me what if my interviewer asked about my D and C and what I gained from my education. I am proud that I am still alive right now and I carried on one blow after another. I tried to show my supervisors and my lecturers that I always wanted to be better despite of my very poor performance. My GPA does not tell them that, but I know myself. My D and C are my becoming, they teach me something the A students did not have. I can take my time to have my brain developed enough to understand all those things that does not make sense now, I would read the books again, I would ask people. But my becoming, my not giving up and getting toughen up, this is my trophy.

I told her what my mum told me, she should not be worried about her GPA. Even if it is important to her, it would not help her if she kept worrying. Her motivation should be to train her character. If she thought she had not worked hard enough, then try better. In the long term it is her character and her passion that matters. Having those, even if she could not get to her first choice grad school because they think her transcript is not amazing enough, then it is their loss.

She told me that she has ambitions in life.

What? Did I make myself sound like some hippies who did not try to achieve anything?

She told me that we have to be realistic. The employers, and the grad school admission boards, want spectacular resumes and fantastic interviews. She told me she believed that even more after taking NUS Career Center Development module (which I took as well and found how a complete arse people in working life could be). She said I was the opposite of her because she believed that she should aim to please the employers or admission boards in this rat race by having a perfect resume, masking it with so-called 'active' verbs, networking with right people, dressing up to give good impression. It is not that I disagree with all that. I agreed but the root of those impressions were the characters they tried to claim they have, right. So, I told her that it is good to do those what career center people told her, but first-thing-first is to really have those characters.

Told her to try to change her mindset, that she was not her GPA. If she could not, at least do it for the sake of her friend, like me, who were losing in our GPA. I really wanted her to do that because I was like that too. No matter how smooth everything was for me, I kept feeling pressurized to achieve more and more. And I sincerely feel awful everytime I remember that pressure, the friends I lost and the time that passed.

I knew I wasted my 2 hours when she said, "Well, what if you were me, who has all the perfect CAP and all that, won't you scared of losing it? You should really go to an interview and see what I meant."

It was awful, it was killing me inside. I could feel my hulk genes started to circulate all over my body. I got up of my chair and I said to her face, "I won't let the world define who I am."

Fuck you.

There I said it. Now I can swallow it along with my night pills.