FRACTURE

The last few days have been quite stressful for me. The results of our second class test (CT2) were published yesterday. I hadn’t told my parents about them, but my dad is a member of our college’s Facebook group, so he saw the announcement himself.

He asked me where I ranked in the PDF. I showed him. I was placed 121st out of 400 students—perhaps that’s still not good enough.

He looked disappointed, but what seemed to affect him even more was seeing a girl’s name at the bottom of the same page. She had ranked 2nd. Looking at me, he asked, “What’s your problem? What are you lacking?” Then he fell completely silent, lowering his gaze to the ground.

It was probably one of the most painful moments my father has experienced regarding my academic performance. It wasn’t just that 120 students had scored better than me. It felt like he was slowly losing the hopes he’d placed in his son—hopes for our family’s future, for financial stability, and even for the day he could finally retire and rest on someone else’s earnings.

What felt unusual to me was that my mother didn’t ask me a single thing about my grades. Normally, she’s the more serious one when it comes to this topic. This time, she simply avoided it, as if silence was easier than words.

If anyone is reading this, I want to tell them something: never judge your child’s future based on another child’s present. Just because someone else has done something, doesn’t mean you have to follow the same path.

Everyone has their own likes, interests, and way of doing things. You can imitate someone and still do well, but it rarely feels right if the idea was never truly yours. It might look fine on the surface, but something inside stays off. And that gap doesn’t usually lead to anywhere good.

The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.
— Carl Gustav Jung