guess what

during primary school, my family went to watch the national day parade at the stadium. i wasn particularly intereted in the performance, but i was shocked once we got there. there were people everywhere i looked, and the ones on the other side of the stadium looked like squirming grains of rice all packed together. i wondered if every last person in singapore had gathered in this place. and so i asked dad- exactly how many people were in the stadium? his answer was that a full stadium would mean around fifty thousand people.

after the parade, the path from the stadium was flooded with people. the sight stunned me. so many people were around me, and yet they only made up a small fraction of the people insingapore. once i got home, i got a calculator and did the math. we learned that the singapore population was four million in some social studies. divide fifty thousand into that, and you only get 1%. i was stunned again. not only was i just one little person in that sea of people in that stadium, but that sea of people, were merely a drop in the ocean. i had always thought of myself to be a special person up until that point. i enjoyed being with my family, and most of all, i thought that my class in my school had the most interesting and happening people in the world. but when i realised that that wasn the case, the things that happened in what i believed to be the most enjoyable class in the wolrd, could be found happening in any school. everyone in singapore would find them to be ordinary occurrences.

once i realized this, my surroundings were becginning to lose their color. brush my teeth every evening, wake up and eat breakfast in the morning, people do those everywhere. when i realized that everyone did all these things on a daily basis, everything started to feel boring. and if there were so many people in the world, there had to be someone living an interesting life that wasn ordinary. im sure of that, but why isnt that person me? that was all i could think about until i graduated from secondary school. and in the process, i realised something. nothing fun will happen if i sit around waiting. so i figured i would change myself in poly. let the world know i wasnt the guy contented with sitting around and waiting. and i conducted myself accordingly.

in the end, nothing ever happened. i got tired of how everyone thought i was unusual, how everyone backstabbed me and i eventually stopped believing in myself, stopped trying to find a more extraordinary world. i become another common people because people stopped disturbing me that way. noone could accept difference. before i knew it, i was out of poly. i thought something would have changed.

TBC.