Stop Comparing

     Last school year, I was one of the top ten smartest students in class for the first and second quarter. Today, our teachers once again asked us to fold a page in our notebook, bring out our crayons, and write "Second Grading Period" as the heading of the new page. Then I realized something. My grades weren't as good as they were last year. I knew that something was awfully wrong. Whatever it was, I simply COULDN'T live with it.

     I tried to compare last year with this year, and my first hypothesis was because my best friends were like millions of miles away. Last year, my confidence was as high as a skyscraper. And now, I had no one to talk to, no one to boost my confidence, and no one to have fun with just because I was seperated from my friends.

     At this very sunny day, I finally had the right answer, and I am more than a million percent sure of this. Our last subject at school was Reading, and we checked our periodic test papers. As usual, my temperature was cold, my heart was beating fast, and I put my palms between my cheeks. Usually, I don't worry about subjects like these since I never get a line of seven. But this year, my grades weren't very good and I badly needed good luck. As I got my paper, my eyes ran towards the raw score without a minute to waste. Seventy four out of eighty. Six mistakes. It was hard to hide the happiness I was feeling, especially when teacher asked everyone with the raw score of seventy to stand up. And there, I found out that my score was the highest. AND, I didn't even study! (Actually, I never do 😂) But I wasn't completely happy. Perhaps 70% of me was happy, and 30% of me was sad. Then I knew that I discovered the answer to my other low grades. I was so competitive. I always checked the scores of my classmates, I always peeked at my classmates' work to see if theirs was better (I didn't cheat of course), and sometimes I thought that there wasn't any problem with me, just with my classmates and teachers. Competitiveness poisoned me.

       In reality, I was already competitive during the half of the second quarter last year when Vinn became my seat mate. He was smart. For a moment, I even thought that he was smarter than me. And on that very day, something called "competitiveness" was born. Until today, they still haven't abandoned me. Tomorrow, I am so going to kick them out. Being too much competitive made my grades go lower, and I don't want it to happen again, especially because the second quarter has started. Tomorrow, I HAVE to kick that competitiveness out. I HAVE to.

*Written On September 4, 2015