‘Turn your wounds into wisdom.’
– Oprah Winfrey, American talk show host
It’s the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) results season; time to cheer the teenage achievers (especially the overachievers) and send them off to campus adventures and incipient adulthood.
This time, though, I want to talk about the other group of school leavers — the ones without honour society stoles, academic medals or college plans; the ones who still don’t know what they could or should do, who taste a tiny dread when the band strikes up “Pomp and Circumstance”.
I’m talking about students who flailed academically, never discovered any particular talent, and drifted unnoticed in the classrooms.
The kids who got into trouble and now think of trouble as their natural habitat; the poor kids, the dwellers in volatile homes and the abusers of substances.
If I could give all those kids a graduation gift, it would be this plain but important truth: Everything can still be fine. Not easy, necessarily, but fine.
This is almost certainly true, no matter what seemingly hopeless mess they have made of their affairs or bleak vision they’ve developed of their own abilities and future. Virtually every 18-year-old has more options and more time than they’ve been led to believe.
A teenager’s biography, whether promising or ominous, should not be interpreted as dispositive proof of years to come.
This is clear to me now, having lived quite long enough to watch old friends rebound from seemingly ruined lives to happy, stable and prosperous adulthoods, and, on the other end, noticing that some of my most promising classmates fizzled out upon contact with the world beyond our little village.
There are plenty of kids, of course, who turn out more or less the way you’d expect. But the whole process strikes me as infinitely less predictable as suggested by the mechanical churn and sort of the school assembly line.
I’m not in denial. It’s a tough world. Turning things around — changing one’s trajectory — is difficult and daunting. Factors beyond our control, like economic class, race and lack of family support, can pile on extra disadvantages.
Even the happiest endings are usually preceded by times when it all looks too hard and hopeless. And people do, tragically, fall through the cracks.
Still, youth should be told — and should believe — that their destiny is not shaped in school. Their personalities are still coming together in the tissues of the brain; time is on their side, and as a Bidayuh, we like underdogs, cheer come-from-behind wins and are generous with second chances.
In the TV show “Mad Men,” Don Draper finds Peggy, his office protégée, curled in defeat and despair after giving up the secret baby she’d conceived by accident. His advice to her comes straight from the id of survival, reinvention and faking it till you make it.
“Get out of here and move forward,” Don tells Peggy. “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”
Messages from families, teachers and friends may be the decisive factor when it comes to rebounding from an unpromising high school career.
“If people in your life tell you, ‘You’re actually not very smart, and you’re not going to make much of yourself,’ you start to internalise that,” said the teacher who saw me, Madam Lucy, to me one day.
“If they say, ‘you can change. You were immature and made bad decisions, but you’re going to grow up,’ that’s very important.”
During my senior year, one of my friends got pregnant with her shambolic boyfriend and decided to have the baby.
When I went off to school, she stayed behind in her parents’ house in the next village, working in a coffee shop and, eventually, taking classes at community college.
I visited her when I came home on breaks. She seemed the same — deep dimples and wry jokes — and I’d hold her baby awkwardly and pretend to think it was exciting that she was a mother. Secretly, I was horrified.
We’d been young together — sharing drinks and snacks at the shop, stealing chicken through starless nights, laughing until we choked.
Then she languished on a barren suburban street, cartoons squawking, and coffee tables sticky from leaking sippy cups. I couldn’t believe she’d gotten trapped like that.
Time unfolded well for her. She got her nursing degree, worked in hospitals, met a new man and had another baby.
As we moved deeper into adulthood, social media started to suggest that our positions had reversed, that she now luxuriated in a freedom I had lost. As I slogged from the milky, sleepless mess of early fatherhood to the chaos of toddlers and primary school, she was launching her own kids into adulthood and taking up mountain biking. I had unkempt hair and pimples; she had a golden retriever, a SUV and spontaneous getaways with her husband.
She’d been a mother too young, I guess, but then again, I wish I’d had my kids a little earlier. It had been easy at 18 to mistake our lives as set in stone and stuck in some social class forever. Now I realise how much of my fatalism was rooted in illusion and a vast oversimplification of time and human affairs.
Nothing particularly bad happened to me in school, but it was, nevertheless, a difficult time containing no hint of future adventure or achievement. I floundered in many subjects and failed in most public exams.
So I did what kids do: I told myself I didn’t care and stopped trying. I distracted myself from the low hum of underachievement by seeking out friends on the margins — burnouts and bohemians, unrepentant subversives. Their company was a relief; caring and falling short had been more bruising than I wanted to admit.
I did go to university, but only after winning a hard – fought prestigious U.S scholarship — and I eventually figured out how to use my brain to the fullest. Living inside my mind had for years been like being locked inside a car I didn’t know how to drive.
I don’t know how else to put this — everything, very suddenly, felt different. The obscure became obvious: how to build models, process raw data and, most crucially, trap and turn into words the complicated ideas that previously drifted through my thoughts like clouds.
I don’t recommend underachievement, let alone delinquency, for anybody. I hope my children are able to thrive along traditional lines. It’s obviously preferable to leave high school with the highest possible grades and minimum erosion of self-esteem.
Stepping into adulthood burdened with a rap sheet, severe emotional trauma or addiction is not ideal.
But it doesn’t have to be the end of the story, either.
You have no idea what’s coming next — or after that or after that. If school was good for you, keep the memories close.
As for the rest of us? It can shock you, after all, how much it never happened.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
