I’m alive

My last Foreign Beaver piece was in January 2023. Its now May 2024 and I’m turning a year older soon.

What have I been upto?

Busy would me an understatement to describe 2023. The first half went in panic attacks and restarting regular therapy to navigate my anxiety. Summer was full of weddings of friends and family - very colorful on the outside, but worrisome on the inside. Most people might not relate or admit, but for me, at this stage of my life, family is A LOT to handle emotionally. It took me years of consistent work to find healthy emotional tools but it still feels like walking on a tightrope everytime I’m exposed to them. Oh and on top of all this, I decided to quit my job and go back to school in September.

I moved out of town for 8 months, used to come back home every other weekend and lost all sense of stability from my daily life.

Graduate school CRUSHED me. For someone who grew up on academic validation, struggling to pass courses was not fun. An unhealthy amount of pressure, toxic competition among students, I got thrown in at the deep end while adjusting to my new living situation.

My biggest realisation has been understanding how poor my academic background is coming from South Asia. I have clear memories of teachers humiliating other students (sometimes hitting them) for not performing well in studies. Parents taking it personally and scolding their child in public if they didn’t do well (in grade 3?!).

I have been quite demotivated by professors in grad school but I am old enough to handle it now. It made me realise kids I grew up with, who struggled with studies, did not deserve that kind of treatment. The idea of pitting children against each other instead of making learning a positive experience is SO TOXIC and counter productive. No child should have to do be good at studies, sports (whatever the parents care a lot about) to receive love and affection. Teachers are supposed to teach and not point out what a student is bad at. Every student has potential to shine and not everyone needs to get straight As.

There is SO MUCH more to the world other than studies. Noone taught us how to take care of ourselves, or our environment, how to handle stress, how to grieve, how to make friends. An entire generation who are in their 30s now have attached their self worth to degrees, salaries, and a bunch of other materialist achievements which should be secondary as a human.

I’m almost half way through my MA right now and all I know is that I don’t want to go back to institutional education after I finish this. I wasn’t gonna be saving lives with the degree anyway but going through the unnecessary pressure while children were dying in a genocide was unsettling. What good is higher education if we can’t voice our opinions without fearing the loss of our livelihood? Yes, basic literacy is important, especially for marginalised groups, but if the ones on top of the pyramid are always acting on their self-interest instead of creating a fair, safe space for others, it feels like a lost battle.

How do we fight these big ideas of Capitalism, Patriarchy, Inequality, if our conditioning has been just to get the answer correct in an exam without even understanding the question? We had History in school for years but we never learnt from it. A larger population of the world has formal education now compared to a century ago, but its still a rich people’s world and you’ll only climb up the ladder if you play by their rules. Intelligence is measured in grades, success is measured with money, there is hardly any sense of community and we just destroyed our planet amidst all of this…

Sometimes I wish I didn’t think so much...

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