Proving Our Worth Has a Cost

My first semester for the master course is coming to an end. The exam started today. I am making time to study in between the demands I have to meet as a mother. Despite the complaints, it is relieving to feel that it isn’t as hard as the student time back then was when subjects were many and syllabuses were huge. It is surprising that we do manage to learn all the concepts we are presented with and we do master enough courage to test ourselves.

I have told my baby, ‘Darling, you have to be a good girl. Ama has to study for her exam.’ She has become clingy after she fell sick last week. But she plays a lot too and we just have to check that she isn’t crawling around and standing from structures that could fall on her. By her active nature, it seems like she will not be a lethargic woman like me. She must take much after her father who says, ‘I don’t like laziness.’ I must thank them here too for the sacrifices they made in choosing to be with me. I am ever indebted to them for that. I know I would be howling now and craving for affection and consolation in moments like this if they were not with me.

Exam is one thing that puts fear in us and it probably is the biggest motivation to make us study. But amidst the entire struggle, my thought always, always and always linger around what we are trying to prove and to whom. I also believe that, we always, always have a choice. So, it is lame to ask why I should prove anything at all to anyone because it is out of my choice that I am here. But no matter what we choose, there are always times when we ask ourselves if the choice we made was the best one and if we had the clearest and the sanest mind at the time of making choice, if we would have made the same choice.

I could choose not to prove anything at all to anyone and just be a mediocre earner, losing half of the friends I have now. I could choose to resign and be a housewife. I could choose to be a teacher in a primary school (which is tempting me more everyday) and be the happiest developer of human beings. Or I could struggle to prove my capability to climb the ladders as high as my peers and be unhappy that I should even worry about proving at all.

But I see the end coming – the end which would really stop me from trying to do anything at all that might not make me happy. I might become a full time mother and a housewife. I might become a teacher. I might become a customer care representative. I think I am better at talking to people and making them happy than anything else on earth. I might as well do that than attempt to write computer programs, create computer networks and chase bugs in the programs.

I might as well put a stop to proving. But for today, I’m glad the exam did not harrow my bones out. They after all do not kill us. They are even easier than we fear. But that is not the reason to keep yourself unhappy. The journey counts.