When Life Weighs Like the Atmosphere

According to my mother, I used to score a perfect 100 on every spelling test I took as a child. I seem to remember missing a perfect score at least once, but apparently, in my mother's memory, I remain an entirely flawless child.

I do not consider this some extraordinary achievement worth boasting about. For me, getting a perfect score on a spelling test or earning excellent grades had always been something perfectly ordinary. It was like the dazzling sunlight that greeted me when I woke up late on a weekend, or the sound of my friends chatting around me. It was simply part of everyday life. Naturally, I never felt the slightest urge to brag about it. Of course, I understand that consistently earning perfect scores is hardly common. Yet precisely because I had experienced such accomplishments from such an early age, I now find myself facing an unexpected struggle.

In the past, I could earn a 4.00 GPA without making any extraordinary effort. I received numerous academic excellence awards without working particularly hard, and I managed to score a 93 on the TOEFL without studying at all. As these experiences accumulated, even the glittering gold plating of an award certificate failed to move me when I shook hands with the principal after winning the grand prize in an English writing competition during civic education class. When my first SAT score approached 1510, my initial reaction was not genuine happiness but relief that my abilities had not been disproven.

From the first perfect score I received on a spelling test to the SAT I took in March, the relationship between "effort" and "achievement" had become completely distorted in my mind.

Call it competence or call it arrogance, but even the most remarkable achievements had become like a glass of water sitting on a table. Under ordinary circumstances, I would simply walk past it. Only when I grew particularly thirsty would I absentmindedly reach for it to quench my thirst.

People often warn us about the moment when something extraordinary begins to feel ordinary. They say that once we take something for granted, gratitude disappears from everyday life, leaving only sharp complaints in its place.

Judging from my own experience, they are not wrong.

As achievement became something I took for granted, failure began to feel like a threat to my very existence. Success was no longer the fruit of effort; it had become the minimum requirement for validating who I was. High scores were expected, and a single failure could instantly reduce all my previous accomplishments to meaningless ashes.

I experienced this denial of my own worth most painfully during the second semester of last year, when a mistake in preparing a mathematics information sheet left me staring at a final GPA of 3.89.

I held my report card and read it over and over again. The numbers remained unchanged. They seemed to fly straight toward me, pierce through my body, and disappear into the distance.

What I felt in front of those numbers was not the ordinary disappointment of thinking, "What a shame. I should have worked harder."

It felt as though the only pillar supporting my belief in my own abilities had shattered into pieces.

At that moment, I realized that the awards and grades I had always received were not medals proudly displayed on my chest. They were shackles, making every step I took heavier than the last.

The joy and satisfaction of receiving an award are like sparks: they flare up and vanish in the blink of an eye. Yet I cannot begin to imagine how long the burden of maintaining those achievements will continue to bind me.

Words such as "Grand Prize," "Excellence Award," and "4.00" had ceased to be sources of happiness. Instead, they had become something like regulations I was obligated to obey.

At this point, the lesson I ought to learn is that failure is inevitable and indispensable.

Failure is painful. It is something I would rather never confront, and the experience can feel so unbearably dry that my esophagus might burn from the thirst.

Yet it is precisely because of this suffering that success can become a glass of water offered to a runner who has just completed a marathon.

Unlike the glass sitting casually on a table, this glass of water is life itself. It is a declaration of victory, the most precious reward imaginable.

As I write these words, I recognize this truth with absolute clarity. I understand it so vividly that I almost feel I have no choice but to live by it from now on.

And yet, perhaps my courage is pitifully small compared to the magnitude of this truth. I cannot bring myself to take even a single step toward failure.

And so the cycle repeats.

In my mind, I long for the nobility of a thirst so intense that it burns my throat. Yet with my hands, I still reach for the familiar glass of water on the table.

I am painfully aware of this contradiction within myself.

Of course, I have no choice but to acknowledge that even this cowardice is a part of who I am. I will probably remain trapped in this pattern for some time. I will continue to hope that my name is firmly engraved on the countless academic excellence awards displayed at the front of the classroom.

But at the same time, I hold on to another wish.

I hope that one day I will experience an overwhelming failure. I hope that, by gradually rising from it, I will gain the wisdom to recognize what a truly meaningful reward looks like.

I hope that I will fall, and fall hard.

Only when the rigid shell of perfection finally cracks will I be able to breathe in the cold air outside.

And when life weighs down on me like the atmosphere itself, I hope I will remember this wish once again.