Happy Star Wars Day. 

Ideally I’d be spending today watching Star Wars (which I still will), but exams are around the corner, and apparently so is another attempt at dealing with them. These aren’t nearly as high-stakes as A-Levels were for me last year, but they still exist, and so does the comparison, doubt, and all the rest of it. Yoda said that fear is the path to the dark side or something. He wasn’t wrong, but he also didn’t have to sit a Linear Algebra paper. 

Being honest is hard. But I think it’s also what kills fear, eventually.

I find it hard to shake the feeling that I’m letting people down. Sometimes I compare myself to others and feel genuinely envious. And other times, I really don’t care, because I don’t want to be the person who’s obsessed with grades anymore. I don’t want to go back to that place. I’m not the girl who felt sick seeing anything less than a particular mark. Or at least, I’m trying not to be. I want to be someone who gives things back to the subject, to other people, rather than someone who just takes from it and measures the return.

I’ve said a lot about exams on this blog: the stress, the pressure, the want to do well. But if there’s one thing I’m trying to hold onto this time, it’s that I want to be the kind of person who can say ‘I want to do well’ without it meaning ‘I need this to go well in order to feel okay.’ And that shift hasn’t been easy, it still isn’t.

That flicker of envy when someone does better than you— I don’t think you can logic your way out of it. And comparison has never, in my experience, made me more aware of my own progress. It’s never made me stop and notice the hard periods I’ve actually come through. When you’ve grown up in a high-pressure academic environment, it becomes easy to assume that high performance equals safety and low performance equals threat. Not just academically, but emotionally and physically too. I remember feeling sick after dropping a single mark in my first ever Calculus class test. Looking back, there was genuinely nothing catastrophic about it. But at the time, it felt like the floor had shifted.

It’s easy to say ‘don’t base your worth on grades.’ But I don’t think anyone has ever transformed from that advice alone. The real shift, if it comes at all, comes from noticing the actual cost of tying your identity to outcomes. The exhaustion of it, the emptiness of succeeding when the motivation behind it is fear rather than curiosity. I’m still in the middle of that and haven’t figured it out.

But for now, for every negative or anxious thought that shows up, I’m not going to fight it anymore. I’m going to let it be there, and trust that it will be okay, because it always has been. I don’t know how it’s going to go, and I guess I’m not supposed to know. It’s a mystery. 

May the 4th be with you. And if exams are around the corner for you too, may the force be with you even more.

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