In almost every Indian household, there's a moment when life stops being about laughter and starts being about ranks.
For me, that moment came the year I turned sixteen.
Till then, life was chaos in the best way — school, tuitions, half-finished novels, forgotten homework, silly pranks with classmates who liked me for my jokes but never invited me to sit with them after school. I was always loud, always smiling, always surrounded. But when the boards approached and the weight of "future" started hanging heavy in the air, everything began to shift.
Suddenly, everyone stopped caring about who you were — only what you could score.
It was like someone had turned my world grayscale.
Marks mattered more than music.
Ranks mattered more than rest.
And conversations became transactions of stress and strategy.
My parents never forced me. But I saw the hope in their eyes every time I opened a textbook. I saw their silent fears masked as encouragement. I knew what they didn't say — Be better. Do better. Prove them wrong.
So I tried.
I signed up for coaching. Early mornings, late nights, mock tests, and revision marathons became my life. My smile became tighter. My jokes became fewer. I still spoke a lot, still carried the mask of the extrovert, but I started cracking underneath.
No one asked why I was suddenly quieter at lunch.
No one noticed the anxiety behind my eyes when results were pinned on the board.
Because "You're the funny one. You're always okay, right?"
Wrong.
The worst part wasn't even the pressure. It was the comparison. Every mark sheet was a mirror reflecting someone else's perfection and my own perceived inadequacy. Friends became competitors. Classmates became reminders of how far behind I was.
And worst of all — I started defining myself by numbers.
There were nights when I stared at the ceiling and wondered: If I don't top this, will anyone still respect me? Will I still be loved?
That's what competitive exams do. They don't just test your memory. They test your self-worth. Quietly. Brutally.
One day, after a particularly bad mock test, I stayed back in the coaching center. Everyone had gone. I sat alone in the empty classroom, holding the question paper like it had betrayed me.
That's when I realized something:
I wasn't just fighting for college.
I was fighting to matter.
Because in a world that only notices your worth when it's printed on a result sheet, how do you remind yourself that you're more than that?
And yet... through all that storm, I didn't let go. I kept studying. Kept pushing. Kept wearing the smile. Not because I believed I was okay — but because somewhere inside, I still hoped that this would end. That maybe if I worked hard enough, a better chapter would begin. One where I wouldn't need ranks to feel valuable. One where someone would look at me — not for what I could achieve, but for who I really was.
And somewhere between exams and exhaustion, between notes and broken sleep I forgot myself.