I have always seen myself as an ambitious child with material fantasies and dream destinations. In short, I want everything I find pleasing.
I want a laptop. I want to go to Japan.
There was a time that I would always throw tantrums at the aisle of toys before so I could convince my mother to buy me a teddy bear that we just saw. My mother, however, had an antidote towards children with such persistent behavior. Her favorite mantra line is: "Work hard in the future, so you can buy anything you want."
Growing up with such ambitious thinking develops into anxiety between the youthful teenage years and the upcoming adulthood stage. My mother contributed to that anxiety somehow, making herself a seemingly evident example of a failed life and no material gains. She always told me that she did memorable mistakes in her life and I should not repeat those. So, in my mind, I tried my best to follow her words of wisdom on doing my best, academically.
Now that I'm seventeen years old, I realize that doing the future the way I perceived it in my childhood takes more than what I had already done. I have to enter college, pass the entrance examination, work for the scholarship, do well in the board examination, and look for a well-paying job. My father even told me that he couldn't support me in college, so I have to work hard by myself. That brought more fear into my system, a couple of what-ifs.
What if working hard is not enough? What if studying is not the answer?
Adulthood life scares me so much to the point that I want to remain just seventeen years of age.
How do I enter college?
By the time I'll graduate from high school, I'll find myself living with newly retired and senior parents. Their pension is allegedly my only hope to be enrolled into college, but at some point, I don't believe the value it holds can support me through this education until I find a sustainable job.
The financial instability terrifies me a lot. My aunties abroad always say that I should not worry about it. They say, in America, newly-turned-eighteen-year-old teenagers often leave their parents' houses and start living life on their own. That culture does test the survivability of a young adult. It is not scary. It is tough, but it is worth living life for. But, I don't think that culture fits a dastard like me.
Alarmed, I wanted to ask every person alive the list of scholarships they know, so I don't have to rely only on my parents' pension to be enrolled in a decent college. The problem is if I don't get scholarships, I'll surely be a burden to my parents then. And it'll hurt my ego, telling me that I haven't done enough. Or, I should have done more than what I could have. A scholarship belongs to someone who is qualified of it, and if I don't get one in the future, it feels like I'm not qualified of an easy life I dreamed about.
My father replied to me that scholarships do not resemble the face of a last hope. In the streets, one could find a café, a barkery, or a meat shop. All of these could be hiring a high school graduate for part-time jobs. My father said it's easy. You work, you earn, and you pay your college.
I thought of these jobs already in my sleep, often wondering how to combine work and education together. It's terrifying. What if I fail doing these things together? What if I don't do well, enough, to prove myself worth fighting to the dreams I once wrote in my childhood's imaginary place?
Then after a long overthinking, I'll still go back to that question like a circular maze.
"How do I enroll to college?" asks that voice. "The certain way. The assured way. How?"
Where do I live?
We live in a simple house, nothing like a suburban but just simple. I thought it's "our" house, but whenever I dare to paint the gate, my mother scolds me not to. She says that this house is not fully paid for yet. Seeing changes in its initial appearance might affect the cost of how much to pay over the land's original title.
I fear waking up, one day, finding my family homeless in the streets, and that fear amplifies whenever my father jokes that my brother and I have to inherit the house debts.
I fear it because I don't know how to solve it.
Finir
Failure is something that one, in his very sense of competency, doesn't want to commit. Sometimes, it brings dismay, worry, and contempt.
It's a simple concept that everyone can digest fully.
I don't want to fail any examinations whether it is for the college entrance, quarterly examination, and simple tests.
I don't want to fail life and end up not achieving those dreams of my childhood.
That's all, for the random thoughts of this night.
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