I must share my feelings with you all; it’s been a challenging day for me. I’ve reached the age of 30, and when I reflect on my life, I find it difficult to see any significant achievements. I’m still residing with my family, who have been a source of emotional toxicity. I haven’t found a romantic partner, have no children, no property to call my own, very limited financial resources, and no formal education to speak of. Most days, I try not to dwell on these shortcomings and simply push forward with my life. But today, it’s been particularly tough.
I unexpectedly ran into a friend from my secondary school days. We spent some time catching up, and as our conversation unfolded, I couldn’t help but feel a wave of sadness welling up within me. You see, there was a time when I was doing reasonably well. I excelled in my studies and often ranked at the top of my class. However, my mental health took a nosedive, and it completely derailed my progress.
Today, when I look at my former classmates, I see doctors, lawyers, IT professionals, teachers, and investment bankers among them. Some have even embarked on the journey of marriage and parenthood. I should mention that I attended a SAP school, and it seems that nearly all my schoolmates have found success in their chosen paths.
Whereas I dropped out of school, have a dead-end job that barely pays, and don’t seem to have much of a future. My highest education level is O levels. I’ve tried going back to school many times but would drop out each time due to the mental health issues that were unfortunately debilitating for me.
I’ve not stopped though, I will be doing my A levels in 2023 once I’ve saved enough money to enrol somewhere. Yet it all feels utterly pathetic and it feels like my life has been a massive failure. I will be a 32 year old doing A levels.
Comparison is the thief of joy, one of the first few things I did almost a decade ago was actually deleting all my social media . I lost touch with most of my friends from school and didn’t know how any of them were doing.
Every now and then I would receive updates from the few people I was in touch with but I would try to keep my head up and not let it bring me down. I’m happy for all these people, they are good people.
It’s not their success that is bringing me down, it’s my own failure, and the magnitude of my failure which becomes so clear once I compare myself to my peers, that’s crushing me. I don’t know how my life ended up here.
For years, I believed that things would work out for me. I believed that it’s not my timeline but God’s timeline, I would tell myself that I can’t follow the timeline of the world. There are so much uncertainty in the world, someone could have all the success in the world and die tomorrow. I had this almost delusional optimism that things would be okay, I believed that God had a plan.
Today, I find myself in tears, thinking that there is probably no God. There is no plan. I’m alone. By telling myself that it was going to be okay, I was just consoling myself. The reality is that I got left behind in life, my life will never be the same as my peers’. I have to make peace with that. There is also a chance that I may never be okay.
Every year, it’s the same questions from my relatives. Everyone is disappointed and ashamed of me. My life has been a failure to them. I don’t blame them for seeing it that way. I used to tell myself that it’ll be okay someday. I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t see myself recovering, leaving my family, having a family of my own, successfully get into uni, having a better job. I don’t see any of it happening.
I just needed to tell someone this, thank you for reading. Tomorrow will be a better day, but today, I just need to lick my wounds.