Badge of Honour

It’s been some time since I posted anything. What with COVID-19 and everything that has left us with even more disorientation than the ordinary...

I am on my 12th year teaching now, and the age gap between my 18 year old students and I is growing wider. Quite factually.

Every year, my new students ask if I knew what I wanted to do for a living since I was their age (18 yo)?

Every year, my last year students ask if I am happy with my job.

The answer to both, is no.

I was clueless and lost when I was 18, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was 21. I fit nowhere.

And we will always fit nowhere, if what we seek is a semblance of social bonds in our labouring.

The economy is structured in such a way that any human being, doing what they do best in the happiest point they are, will not be paid or is paid poorly. It is called capitalism. It will reap you for all you are worth, and them some, and ruin any meaningful relationship you have with your loved ones. It’s just how it’s been operating in the past three centuries. We are minuscule compared to how complex and advance it’s structured.

All we have, are those fleeting moments when we can see the best us in our social relationships. It can be in music, poems, film, a lab experiment, a garden... When we labour, we can realise the most worthy part of us in our social relationships. And I—becomes us.

If this is what you relate to, you won’t be paid much by the capitalist economy. You would have to let go of your aspirations for upward mobility, and the social acknowledgements that come with it. You would have to accept social stigmas. “Failure”, “outcasts”, “a shame”. You would need to grow a thicker skin.

But I promise you, if you can feel self-empathy in ways that are in line with your social empathy, other options seem unnecessary. Being a social outcast, slowly, becomes a badge of honour.

Know that you are not alone in feeling that way. In a dog-eat-dog social world, not being successful might mean you never had the heart to step on someone else’s to toes to get ahead. And you begin to see those who can, in a very different way.