Average

Author: Adit Vishnu

Someone once told me that if I was the smartest person in a room, I was in the wrong room. It was quite easy to say I believed in this until I had to face a complete change in environment. As someone who quite easily made it to the far right of any class yet, I had never really put myself in the shoes of the far left.

I understand now that it is, in every sense, belittling to be someone who actually pulls the average down. The initial days were a crash course on how wrong I was on a lot of counts, especially about myself. The calm and composed world I had built around me came crashing down. I was drowning even before I realized I was not on solid ground. Even worse, when I realized I was drowning, my thoughts were not about how to swim. I was confused about why I was drowning in the first place. Again, someone had told me that it was good to be confused, with a caveat: you should think about how you can solve the problem.

Against instinct, I stopped struggling and decided to plummet to the bottom, knowing that the answers to my questions were definitely not on the surface. The answers I came upon were simple but not easy to digest. The calm and composed world I’d built for myself had foundations of hypocrisy. It was time to tear the world down as I had known it. It took a fairly long time, but my world was up again, this time on firm, solid ground with foundations of raw truth and adversity. I guess it took a bit of anarchy and chaos to bring world order.