being the smartest kid in class ruined me

what i lost in pursuit of perfect grades

the perks of being a wallflower (2012)

i don’t think i learned anything in school.

i mean, i know i did. technically.

i’ve spent the majority of my life in classrooms — desks and chalkboards and fluorescent lighting and uniforms that never quite fit right. i know how to do basic math. i know photosynthesis and the mughal empire and a few too many things about the water cycle. i’ve written the definitions of mitosis and democracy in enough exams to remember the first three words by heart. there were tests i aced and deadlines i met and gold stars i collected like currency. so sure, i learned something. but did i learn in the way i like to learn?

the only subjects that ever really lit me up were history, english, and psychology. the ones that came with stories. with people. with meaning. history wasn’t just dates and wars to me — it was drama. it was betrayal. it was power plays and fragile egos dressed up as diplomacy. i’d go home after class and try to piece it all together like a puzzle, imagining regimes as characters in a novel, trying to figure out who ghosted who and why. english made me fall in love with language — how a sentence could hold both sorrow and softness at once. and psychology? it taught me how to read people. how to notice the twitch of a brow, the slight shift in someone’s tone. but i think some of that was just me — how i interpreted the subjects. because when i talked to my classmates, they didn’t always see what i saw. and maybe that’s the thing — even when you’re learning the same curriculum, you grow into a completely different person from the one sitting next to you.

i remember telling my mom over and over: “i understand the concept. i get the story. i just didn’t memorize it word-for-word from the textbook.” because that’s what school wanted. not curiosity. not connection. just replication. understanding wasn’t the goal. memorization was.

and the thing about memorization is — it doesn’t hold. memorization is a strange beast — like dating someone only for their looks: surface-level, temporary, bound to fall apart under pressure. and that pressure? it grew quietly over the years, like a tight knot pulling at my ribs. i was the kid who always came first in class. the overachiever. and when that became the only thing i was known for, it also became the only thing i couldn’t afford to lose. my parents never screamed or threatened — but i knew they’d be disappointed if i slipped. and i had nothing else to fall back on. no trophies in sports, no hidden talent in music. school was it. so when a test question didn’t match the rehearsed pattern? full-body, heart-thudding, breath-catching panic. because if i didn’t ace it, then who was i?

funny thing is none of what i memorized ever really stayed. the panic, yes. the pressure, always. but the answers? the diagrams, the dates, the definitions? they vanished the second the test ended. and yet, some things did stay. not equations. not facts. but stories.

i’m a person who learns through stories. through people. through the messy, beautiful thing that happens when a character in a film says something and you feel it in your chest like a memory you didn’t know you had. i watch movies and read books and listen to songs and then spend hours dissecting them in my journal like a surgeon with a scalpel. i write about lyrics. i write about the way characters move. i write about how one line in aftersun destroyed me more than any school assignment ever did.

but that doesn’t mean i think school was useless. i understand its value. school gave me structure. school gave me vocabulary. school gave me the tools i needed to decode the world around me. if it wasn’t for school, i probably wouldn’t be here writing about it in the same words that school once handed me. but the irony is — it gave me just enough to interpret the stories that would later teach me everything school couldn’t. i’ll always credit school for handing me the dictionary. but it was the stories that taught me how to speak.

school gave me the language. stories gave me the lens. school gave me a way to measure myself (for better or worse). and for a while, it was everything. especially because the very first compliment i ever remember getting was about my intelligence. my mom still tells the story: “you were so smart even as a kid. you kept asking for more books than i could read to you.”

reading came easy to me. writing too. i was always the girl with the answers. the one teachers expected to excel. and slowly, quietly, my entire sense of self-worth got braided into those grades.

but if i had to name the things that actually shaped me? the things that turned me into who i am today? it wouldn’t be the periodic table. it wouldn’t be integration. it wouldn’t be whatever chapter 8 in the civics textbook was. it would be the hunger games. the fault in our stars. perks of being a wallflower. dead poets society. before sunset. pride & prejudice. her. arrival. i could write you an essay about each one. maybe i will.

little women (2019)

in school, we didn’t learn — we memorized. we practiced for exams like they were auditions for the rest of our lives. no one asked us to understand. we weren’t encouraged to ask why. just how. and then how fast. studying didn’t feel like learning — it felt like survival. it became muscle memory. not thinking, just repeating. and somewhere along the way, learning stopped being about discovery — it became a performance of retention.

and i performed.

i had a 10/10 GPA in math and science in tenth grade. today, if you asked me what i actually learned that year? i’d be lucky to name two topics. and even then, i’d probably get them wrong. and i wasn’t even particularly good at math or science. it’s just not the way my brain works. but i wasn’t going to let myself “fail”. not when my whole identity was built around being the Smart Girl™. so i did what i had to: i went to tuition classes. i did the mock questions. i solved them until my fingers hurt and my brain was numb.

in eighth grade, i had moved schools. again. for the fourth time. to a new city. with new uniforms and a new social order. this time, i ended up in a school where the kids were effortlessly fluent in english, reading for fun, quoting current events, knowing things i didn’t. for the first time in my life, i wasn’t the smartest person in the room. and i felt small.

i didn’t just feel out of place — but out of language. like everyone else had been handed a manual and i was just flipping through the glossary, hoping to catch up. it wasn’t just about grades anymore. it was about knowing how to be.

there’s that one quote — “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room” — yeah, i didn’t love it at the time. because up until then, being the smartest was the only thing i had. now? i didn’t even have that. i passed eighth grade with an 88% and cried for weeks. and i know it sounds dramatic but at the time, it felt like the end of the world. like everything i believed about myself had been quietly rewritten.

but something else happened that year too. i made friends. real ones. the kind of friends who introduced me to good music. to tumblr. to books. to characters who felt more like mirrors than fiction. and through them, something shifted. for the first time, i saw a version of life where learning didn’t have to come at the cost of joy. where curiosity mattered more than competition.

and slowly, i started letting go of that pressure — or at least loosening its grip. ninth grade ended up being the best year of my life. i passed with a 9.6 GPA, but more than that — i passed with a group of friends who saw me for more than my report card. friends who made me laugh in the middle of physics class, who passed notes with inside jokes instead of formulas. friends who are still in my life today. i have more memories from that one year — sleepovers, music, laughter — than most of my school life combined. and for once, i felt like i could be both smart and soft. both ambitious and alive.

but even the best year doesn’t stop the system from marching on. the pressure didn’t ease. not in india. every academic milestone came with its own carrot-on-a-stick. “just get through tenth grade.” “okay now just do well on your twelfth board exams.” “alright now just get into a good college.” so i did. i got the grades. i scored over 90%. i followed every rule. and still, somehow, i wasn’t “good enough.” the rejections cut deep — not just because i didn’t get in, but because my entire self-worth was wrapped up in being the girl who always did. the identity i’d built — the one that was supposed to guarantee success — cracked. again.

the universities i wanted had higher cutoffs. they expected sports certificates, extracurriculars, the right connections — things i didn’t have. i remember sitting there, thinking — i worked so hard. i cared. i played by the rules. and yet, none of it seemed to matter.

and the worst part? i didn’t even remember half of what i learned. we were trained to study for exams. not to study for life. we were taught to memorize, regurgitate, forget. and for what?

sometimes i think the only difference between a student who uses chatgpt to answer their homework and the ones we praise for “working hard” is that the “hard workers” memorized those answers before copying them down. not to dismiss effort entirely —but maybe we should question what we’re rewarding. both are symptoms of a broken system. one pushes shortcuts. the other to burnout. and neither leaves you feeling like you actually learned anything.

gilmore girls (2000)

i didn’t realize just how much the system had shaped me — and how little i’d learned to trust myself — until i got to university in canada.

here, assignments actually ask you to think. you can’t just rewrite a textbook and expect an A+. you have to understand the concept. apply it. analyze it. challenge it. the first few months, i struggled hard. i couldn’t get away with last-minute cram sessions. i couldn’t zone out in class and expect to fake it later. the system here demanded presence. participation. perspective.

and it hit me — i had no idea how to learn. what i had learned instead, for all those years, was how to perform. how to meet expectations. how to be a grade on a paper. how to turn myself into a checklist and hope someone, somewhere, would stamp me with approval. and unlearning that? it was brutal. i shut down when i wasn’t instantly good at something. i started submitting work i knew wasn’t my best — just so i could say i was done. but slowly and eventually, i started asking better questions. instead of “is this good enough?” i asked “do i get this?” “does this make sense?” and that changed everything.

but when all of that was stripped away, when no one was handing me questions they expected memorized answers to — what was left? what did i actually know?

what i knew… was stories.

and maybe that’s what saved me. what made me feel like a person again. not a perfect student. not a walking GPA. just a girl watching arrival at midnight and crying over a line of dialogue. just a reader underlining the same sentence in the fault in our stars over and over until it felt like it belonged to me.

the stories never asked me to prove anything. they just asked me to feel. to sit with a sentence for longer than it takes to memorize it. to ask why instead of just how much does this weigh? to wonder if rebellion can be quiet. if love can be a conversation. if loneliness has a shape. and maybe that’s what learning is supposed to be — not the collecting of facts, but the deepening of understanding. not a sprint to the right answer, but a walk with the right questions.

and those questions didn’t come from classrooms. they came from stories.

stories like the hunger games, which made me look at the world differently — sharper. it taught me how power works, how people break, how systems hide their cruelty in plain sight. it was the first time i fully noticed what the real world was doing — and started forming opinions of my own instead of echoing someone else’s.

or the perks of being a wallflower gave me a word for what i was. a wallflower. a listener. the person who was there, always there, but never really in it. i didn’t magically change overnight, but something shifted. i started noticing myself more — where i stood in a room, where my voice went. i think it was also the first time i understood what depression might feel like. not in a clinical way, but in the language of sitting in your room at night and feeling like everything is too much and not enough at the same time.

these stories gave me a mirror, but also a map. they made me curious. made me brave. they’re probably the reason i chose psychology. and writing. and storytelling. and paying attention. these stories didn’t just shape my interests — they shaped me.

today, i’m a mosaic of every story i’ve ever loved.

i can’t point to exactly what i took from each one, but they’re all there — in the way i write, the way i analyze things, the way i try to make sense of people. i think even the way i fall in love is shaped by the characters i’ve admired. i haven’t actually fallen in love yet — apparently my standards are too high. blame the stories. they taught me what mattered. not blue eyes or perfect hair or height — but how someone makes you feel. how they listen. how they understand you. i started flagging dealbreakers in fictional people before i ever dated in real life. and now i know i’d rather be alone than settle for someone who only checks boxes.

dead poets society (1989)

i guess that’s what it all comes down to. stories asked me to feel and made me more human. school asked me to fit and tried to make me a product. i know not everyone came out the same. even inside that system, we all turned into different versions of ourselves — some more rebellious, some more resigned. but still, it was a system. a machine. one that tried to shape us into something neat. efficient. productive. and i don’t want to be a product. i want to be a person. a person who learns. not for an exam. not for approval. but for the joy of understanding something deeply.

i don’t think school failed me — but i do think it missed the point.

it was meant to make life easier to navigate. instead, it made me think there was only one way to succeed — one track, one system, one kind of intelligence. and that’s just not true. i know that now.

there were kids in my class who lit up on stage or made magic on the cricket pitch — and they were made to feel like failures because they didn’t do well in math. we should’ve been taught to grow in the directions we’re meant to grow, not forced to bloom in someone else’s garden.

what i’ve learned, especially since moving to canada, is that i actually love learning. when the system allows me to learn in a way that works for my brain, i thrive. i research more, think deeper, write better. not because i’m scared of failing — but because i’m interested. because it matters to me. i remember one essay being the turning point where i had to scrap everything halfway through because one study contradicted the rest — and instead of panicking, i felt alive. i was building something from scratch. not for a grade, but for myself. and that felt… joyful. like i was finally learning with my whole heart, not just my performance.

and maybe that’s the whole point. maybe we should stop asking how much did you score? and start asking what stayed with you?

because the things that stayed with me were never from a textbook. they were from stories.

but maybe that’s the real lesson school never taught me: learning isn’t about collecting facts or chasing grades. it’s about connection. about curiosity. about feeling something so deeply that it changes how you see the world — and yourself.

the stories i loved didn’t ask me to be perfect. they didn’t ask me to compete or perform. they invited me in. let me ask questions. let me wonder and get lost and find myself again.

and that’s what i need learning to be. not a race, not a checklist, not a series of boxes to tick — but a journey. a conversation. a slow unfolding of who i am and who i want to become.

school showed me what doesn’t work. and from there, i got to build something new — learning on my own terms, in my own time, with stories lighting the way.

and honestly? that feels like the smartest thing i’ve ever done.

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ps. next week, i’m launching a recurring series called typing…on the record — a space where i’ll write about the pieces of media that have shaped me. books, films, shows, albums, lyrics, scenes. just through my lens. through the heart of someone who grew up learning from fictional characters and falling in love with ideas. i hope you’ll stick around for it.

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🎧 this week’s soundtrack

the song that lives inside these words

this song hit me so hard the first time i heard it — because it perfectly captures that mix of trying to be good enough and feeling like you’re barely holding it together. lyrics like “they told me all of my cages were mental / so i got wasted like all my potential” speak to that exhausting pressure to perform without really feeling free. this essay is proof of that struggle — trying to be the smartest, the best, the perfect student, while losing sight of who i really am. the song’s honesty and tired vulnerability felt like someone else putting my feelings into words. it’s the soundtrack to what i was living, even when no one else saw it.

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thank you for being here.

whether you meant to arrive or just wandered in through some strange hallway of the internet — i’m grateful you made it to my little corner. it’s a strange thing, to share thoughts into the void and have someone, somehow, receive them. i don’t take it lightly.

typing…still runs on feelings, pop culture spirals, and the generosity of those who believe that overthinking is, actually, an art form worth supporting. simply knowing you’re here, reading what i wrote, feels like its own kind of magic.

if this made you feel something (or at least tilt your head and go hmm), you might consider one of these small joys:

🥐 send a croissant my way — a small, one-time gesture to help keep this soft, chaotic little lighthouse lit.

💌 become a paid subscriber — a way to support the spirals regularly, and receive the occasional extra musing or love letter in return.

no pressure. truly. most of this will always be free. because at its core, this space is just me trying to make sense of the world by writing into it — and hoping someone out there feels a little less alone because of it.

but if you’ve ever read something here and thought “she should spiral for a living”… then know this: your presence alone brings that dream a little closer to reality. and that’s no small thing.

with unreasonable amounts of affection,

anshika ✨