I Found My Strenght Later In Life

I found my strength later in life. As a child I was always respectful to authority and did things as a child should do. I didn’t say 'no' much and I learnt my lessons well. They were the lessons that all children were taught, to be respectful to authority and pass the tests they gave you with good grades. That’s not to say that even as a young child I didn’t show signs of what I am now, on my first day of school I kicked the teacher and only became friends with her when she gave me a chocolate and treated me nicely. Later on I defied my teachers outside the classroom where I thought they had no power over me. But when requested to do things in the classroom I never questioned them and I was innocent and perhaps even naïve not to even think about what was within their boundaries to ask me; like certain donations or certain fees, it was just so much pressure not to be like everyone else. There was no real thinking and just instincts and lessons learnt.

But that’s how children should be; obedient and smart and able to take in all that they’re being taught. The real trouble is that sometimes this is all that people learn, and there are many more schools other than ones with teachers and classrooms, but no one pays much attention. Real life has a school of its own that you graduate to after having learnt those lessons in elementary school. Real life teaches you to find your strength and it tells you something that seems contradictory to what you’re taught before, it tells you that you have the right to say no and to choose when to listen to what you’re being told. I was a good student of both schools and that’s why, after having learnt all the rules, I learnt when I could break them.

It’s not that I’ve changed, I’ve just developed. College was marked with defiance and voicing out my cases. I wasn’t doing it to get attention or to prove that I could say no, but the lessons I got from real life were equally balanced by those I got from school. I found my strength when I combined both of these lessons and decided to apply them.

Sometimes the problem is that people stop learning. School spoon feeds you so much and when you pause to be spoon fed again, you pause indefinitely. There’s more to life than school. As a child I didn’t possess much thought or doubt about anything, I wasn’t defiant to most things that came across my way. I did not possess strength. Strength came much later in life, when I paused and realized that what I learnt was not enough, what I learnt was not adequate and what I learnt would not get me through. I was sick of being timid and without character, and I was tired of not finding any love or respect. I didn’t blame people though, I blamed myself because I didn’t deserve their love and respect. I looked inside me for those and only found my strength when I found them.