Anecdotes and Realizations

 The boards have ended and the holidays have begun! Atleast for the moment. I had dreamed of the 21st of March for ages, imagining what freedom from the boards would look like, and to say the very least, it was anti-climactic.  I was like a chicken without a head, purposeless and unaware of my surroundings ( however, I was not decapitated so my simile ends here). This year has been quite a journey for me. I started off feeling very good about myself and with a positivity like no other, due to various factors, I had reached a scary, anxious position of mental health. I hoped that an epiphany would come but they didn't. I wondered why I wasn't feeling as happy as I knew I should be feeling. The boards ended! I also rejoined Instagram. Instagram, the last time around, was a hot mess for me. I always felt like I had to fit into some box and be a certain person. But, Instagram is merely a tool. A tool to make me feel better or worse is up to me. I used to hesitate from sharing my b...

As teeny fifth graders, my friends and I had observed pimpled, gawky teenagers going to write their board exams. Their face full of dread, their hands full of books and their house full of panic. Year after year lakhs of children have had the joy of learning what shifting cultivation is called in Brazil (Roca, by the way, if you didn't know that what even have you studied? education has failed you).  And like a movie, where a page flips rapidly to segue into the protagonist's adult life, we find ourselves in tenth grade. The night before our first board exam was panic and excitement. My parents hovered around double-checking and triple-checking hall tickets and uniforms and shoes and pencils and other necessary items. Our class group was abuzz with nervous chatter and my stomach felt like competing with KBR gardens over who could amass the most butterflies. The morning of the board exam was the most determined I had felt in my life. Like the culmination of so many things and th...