I’ve recently started playing video games again.
That might sound trivial, but for a long time it wasn’t something I felt “allowed” to do. Somewhere along the way, games got under the category of being “unproductive”, and with that came the kind of guilt that lingers even when you’re supposedly relaxing. I’m very grateful to the friends who nudged me back into it and constantly reminded me that rest doesn’t have to be earned by working myself to exhaustion.
One of the games I’ve been playing for past few days is Celeste. If you’ve ever played it, you’ll know: you die1. Constantly. Sometimes hundreds, thousands of times in a single chapter. And yet, and this is the strange part, it never feels like failure. The screen resets instantly, without judgement or penalty. It just feels like a quiet invitation to try again. Try better.
In fact, the more I struggle in Celeste, the better it feels when I finally make it. The difficulty isn’t a flaw of the experience, in fact, it is the experience because progress is measured not by avoiding failure, but by learning how to move through it.
And yet, when it comes to exams, my brain seems to run on an entirely different script. One small mistake in a paper feels2 catastrophic. The very same brain that will happily die a thousand times in a game suddenly decides that struggling in maths, the thing I love, is unacceptable.
Exams are famously rubbish at capturing understanding. And it’s not just me. Exam stress, dread, and self doubt are incredibly common, especially among people who care deeply about their subject. But even knowing that, it’s easy to feel alone when you’re in the middle of it.
Recently, someone said something3 to me that’s stuck. Paraphrasing Shakespeare in Love, it was along the lines of:
“I don’t know how it’s going to work out. I’m not supposed to know. It’s a mystery. It just will”
There was something oddly comforting about that. Not because it removed the stress (it didn’t) but rather that it removed the demand to know, to predict, to control. It wasn’t saying I wouldn’t worry, but that uncertainty doesn’t mean catastrophe.
And that line sits surprisingly well alongside Celeste’s philosophy. You don’t need to see the whole level, or know how everything ends, you just need to make the next jump. And if you fall? You just try again.
I don’t think the lesson here is that exams should feel easy, or that stress can be eliminated entirely. Maybe it’s just that we need kinder models for struggle where mistakes are treated as useful information and not identity.
So I’m trying, slowly, to carry that mindset across. It’s difficult, but not insurmountable4.
No XKCD this time, instead, here’s a short clip of Philip Henslowe from Shakespeare in Love. Enjoy!
- Footnote – there’s more to Celeste than just dying a lot of times. At its core, it’s about climbing a mountain, and it’s not just about reaching the summit, but learning how to keep going when the climb gets hard. ↩︎
- Reminder again: feelings are not facts. ↩︎
- I did actually print that section of the script out and now it’s stuck on my wall ↩︎
- Pun intended ↩︎
Maths Rant 