The story happened two years ago when I first started my secondary school. It was a great change for me. I had a new environment to adapt to and some new classmates to meet. But those were not the toughest parts of the new secondary school days. In fact, the 6 core subjects (there were only 4 in primary school!) was the toughest part to deal with.

I can still recall the Christmas holiday then. To cope with the 6 new and hard subjects, I stayed at home all day long during the holiday. I didn’t go out and play. I didn’t play video games. I didn’t hang out with friends. I just stayed at home and worked hard in my studies.

In the past years, I used to go out and play every Christmas. There were only 4 easy subjects in primary school. It’s a piece of cake for me. I could handle them without being hardworking. 

However, secondary school life was another story. I had to pay so much attention to jot down notes and understand the meanings of the textbooks. I had got no time to go out and play! Worse still, my mom stopped helping me with my studies since Form 1. I was forced to be hardworking and independent. 

While taking a break from the exhausting work, I took out my phone and listened to some music, just to temporarily wind down from the exhausting revision. I looked at Instagram and came across some new posts from my friends. They were hanging out with each other, traveling around and playing. I felt I was so weird. With such hard and brain-consuming work to do, how could they have time to go out and play?

‘Am I that stupid? It seems that all my friends have finished their work while I’m still struggling with mine!’ This was the first time I felt different. I felt that I was stupid that I needed to spend so much time studying.

Here is not the end of the story.

Weeks later, our academic report came out. My ranking was the 6th! I felt different again!