Friend or Foe?

Bells of my heart rang loud, pupil grew wider, palms started to sweat, lips dried out, mouth ajar and body frozen. How many of you have experienced this state of yourself? Why? Is it always because of the love of your life? Fear begs to differ. Yes. Attraction could make your heart skip a beat, alter your reality, and make you feel like you are floating when he/she is attracted to you too. But fear could make your heart stop beating, crash your reality, and lift your soul to float its way to heaven as you lay dead when your fear comes true. It was definitely fear in my case.

Fear is constant. For everyone who believes change is constant, fear poses as a pioneer of contention with its omnipresence. The rad is that, like most other things, there are 2 sides to this coin as well – The good and the bad. The good is that it gives you an image of what a failure could be and makes you run in the opposite direction. The bad is that it gives you a phantasm of the worst and forbids you from your success with hurdles such as self-doubt, nervousness, low self-esteem, feeling of inadequacy, belief in the impossibility of the possible being possible for you, etc.

I too was feared at that moment. With tears brimming my eyes and the awareness of my graded answer sheets in my bag, I purposefully chose to walk back home from school. Any excuse to delay my arrival at home. But that was a mistake. A blunder. The longer I took, the more fear larked in my head. I was a seventh grader who flunked in a subject by 3 marks. I was a twelve year old daughter of a Charted Accountant who flunked in Mathematics. Mom would definitely kill me this time. Or disown me. Except that, she would do neither. She would go for an unendurable third option – “Look at your sister. She is a topper. She never scores less than 85. Why can’t you be like her? Why do you always have to humiliate me? Look at the other girls of your age …”

If you are someone who is thinking, the third option is better, then you have no idea what real pain is. Not being accepted for who you are as a child or teenager could scar you for a lifetime.

During that walk to home, I either constantly wished for death or planned multiple ways to kill myself before I reach home but was too much a wimp to execute any. ‘Maybe I should run away’, I concluded when I was at my doorstep. But before I could make a move on that thought, my mom opened the door with a smile. I knew that mouth would never supply any warmth, in the form of smiles or words, for a while, after the disclosure of my marks. Fear stalled tears in my eyes and frog in my throat.

“What happened, sweetheart? Why are you crying?”

There it was. The ‘C’ word at the mention of which my dam broke. I cried and cried until she asked if this was about the results of my Quarterly exam. I nodded and showed her my papers. As predicted, my mom chose option 3. After half an hour of being yelled at for not being intelligent and someone else, I was sent to my room. Needless to be said, I had no evening snacks on that day and the entire week that followed, until my mom spoke to me.

That night, I made a written promised to my diary that I’d jump off the roof. Only death could solve that misery of mine. My own mother did not love me, let alone the entire world. No one wanted me in this world. I was useless and a failure. I had no reason to exist.

The next day was Sunday. For the first time, I wanted a Sunday to be a Monday just so that I could skip dealing with my disappointed family and be with my supportive friends. So I stayed in my room with my books that morning, when my sister took me to the terrace to talk. Was she going to lecture me? Or boast about her accomplishments? I did not know and did not want to. But I had to listen because she was my elder sister.

Once we were on the terrace, she had the audacity to face me, look in my eyes, and say, “I read what you wrote last night in your diary.” All I wanted to do was prance on her and dig my nails into her chest and rip that heart out although I doubted if she had one. How could one read another’s journal without permission? Just because I flunked in the exam, she believed she attained some right to treat me like this? Invasion of privacy is offensive even when she was a family member. This is why death was necessary for me. I am too powerless to escape this kind of arduous situations.

“I know you hate me now for that. But I just had to make sure you do not make any wrong decision. I understand what you are going through”, she continued, calmly. I was too raged to give a verbal response. How in the world could she understand my feelings? She was like a robot. She did not have many friends, she was the class topper, and she was studying ALL THE FREAKING TIME. She was the exact opposite of me. There was no way she understood even a single aspect of my insurmountable problems or grievance. “I understand because I have flunked as well.” Wait. What? “Yes, I have flunked. That too in my third grade mid-term paper. Mom scolded me badly. She said she was ashamed of me. She said she wished I was not a bad daughter. Imagine listening to these as a seven years old kid. It was devastating. It scarred me deeply. But I did not want to end my misery by ending my life. I ended my misery by fighting the source of it.” She fought mom? “I studied hard.” Oh. That. “I was afraid that mom was going to hate me forever. I studied hard until mom said that she was proud of me. I am working harder to keep it that way. So now you decide. Do you want to die as a loser or live with pride.”

She left as soon as she was ended her speech with a punch line. She left me speechless. Did she just come up with that punch line? Or was she working on it all night? Either way, her speech made sense. I took her advice and studied hard to live with pride. I improved and sustained just like her. My marks spiked from 40s to 60s in my exams. I also maintained my status as an average student throughout my school days. Only after receiving my moderate results of the Board Exam did I realize, me and my sister were the 2 sides of the same coin. She was the Good of fear and I was the Bad. She bent fear into a staircase and repaired it into an escalator that lifted her up to the floor of success. I, on the other hand, designed fear into a door so that I could walk through it. But not every door led me to the pantry of success. She had a command over fear. Fear and I were just friends who pulled each other’s leg. Now, I know why mom wanted me to be like my sister. She wanted me to conquer fear, life, and success just like my sister did. Now I know that fear is a friend. You should decide who it is shall be. Antonio or Brutus? Sirius Black or Peter Pettigrew? Obama or Trump?