Who'm I working for?

I'd like to be / Under the sea / In an octopus's garden, in the shade...
-Ringo Starr

Wow. My first upload. That's something special.

I'm writing this post to procrastinate studying for an exam I have on Tuesday - it's currently Saturday. The exam is extremely important and currently, I am not prepared enough. But I really, really dislike the subject and think I probably need to take a break.

With this exam in particular, I'm in a weird situation. It's my final exam of high school, and how well I do could determine my future in a serious way. I have an offer from a university that I have spent a lot of time working to get into, and my admission is conditional on my final grades, this being one. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the grading system, but the premise is that I have to excel in one exam, and do good in the other two.

I'm sure I've done good in the two that've come so far. But I'm equally sure that I haven't excelled, meaning that if I want to get into this university, I need to excel in this final exam. And that isn't gonna happen. It is by far the most difficult subject of the three, and anyway, there's probably not enough time left for me to majorly turn things around. I'll likely do fine, but it won't be good enough.

I've been thinking about that a lot, which has led me to question my motivations. Why do I want to go to this university, anyway? It has a reputation for being so academically intense that the local nightclubs shut before midnight during exam season because no-one bothers to go out. Apparently every term is just like a continuous exam season. And I hate exams - why else would I be writing this? It sounds horrible. The only thing is the prestige.

Okay, sure, you got me - maybe I'm just writing this to cope with my impending rejection. You're probably right. But now that I've acknowledged this, that I'm probably gonna miss the criteria, it makes me question: why even bother with this final exam?

I really, really struggle to put together a coherent answer. I suppose, on a logical level, it would be super dumb, and very ironic, if I actually had excelled in one of my previous exams and merely needed to do well enough in this one. That's my conscious explanation. But also, I feel like there's something way less logical. Back at the end of primary school, we wrote time capsules to our future selves. I still have mine somewhere, and I haven't read it; I promised myself I wouldn't until the end of high school. I don't really know what I wrote. But there is one thing I remember, and that's that I wrote to myself: 'you better have gotten straight As.'

It's the one sentence I remember writing out of all the sentences I wrote in primary school. It is a sentiment I have rested on throughout the whole of high school. And I don't really remember why I thought getting straight As was important. I probably didn't have a specific ambition in mind; I probably just thought it was cool. So it's completely irrational, and it's what's been carrying me through these years, though I only remembered it recently.

That's the main reason I'm still revising, even though I'm sure I've failed. I just don't want to let my little self down. At this point we're like completely different people; he would be shocked at some of things I've done and I would probably hate his company. But I couldn't bear to think that I didn't keep that promise, cause at the end of the day, it's to myself. And it looks like I am gonna get straight As, after all. It's just that I don't think that's enough anymore.

16.05.26