Rayo

The speaker reflects on the pressure to succeed starting in secondary school, driven by parental expectations. Despite their parents' tough love, they feel anxiety and a constant need to prove themselves. This pressure leads to a sense of not truly owning their life and feeling unsupported in failure. The speaker longs for a sense of safety and love beyond just achievement. I'd stay around primary school, but it became intense in secondary school, like year 9, year 10. That's when, I guess, everything became about results. I remember getting a B in a math test, like literally a class test, and my mom looked at me like I'd failed. She said, do you want to be sweeping the roads? Is that why we came here? I was 13, and that stuck with me. Yeah, I do, that's the thing. They weren't being evil, my mom especially. She's loving in her own way. But for her, love is, I'm tough on you, so the world can't break you. The problem is, the pressure breaks you anyways, and you're scared to fail. Not because failure is bad, but because failure means, I guess, to let them down. I used to get anxiety attacks, for example. I never really spoke to anyone, definitely not my parents about it. There's no language for that in our house. You can't say, oh, I'm anxious, or I'm burnt out. They'll say, you think you're the first to go to school? So I started bottling things up. Even now, I'm at uni, I still feel like I'm chasing something, not even for myself or for them. Like I'm trying to prove their sacrifice wasn't wasted. No, I've tried once or twice. My mom says I'm being dramatic, and my dad says, just focus. They don't get that it's not about getting a degree, it's about carrying the expectations 24-7. And you start to feel like your life is not really yours. Sometimes, but I always follow up the question by, what's next? I got into uni, cool. Now it's, when are you graduating? Then it'll be, when are you getting a job? When are you getting married? It never ends. It always feels like a no-no. I'll say, I love you, but I need you to love me when I fail too. I need to feel safe, not just successful.