Author’s Note: this is possibly the most vulnerable thing I have ever written on the internet, and I think that’s saying a lot—especially for me. My near-death experiences, relationship drama, and connection with my culture have all been aired for the public to see. But this, this feels scarier. This feels different.
I took the SATs three times. I never hit perfection. God, that’s embarrassing, isn’t it? Over two years and seventeen thousand, five hundred and twenty hours of study, I still wasn’t enough.
As I clicked open the College Board website, my hands shook. I calmed my breathing and pressed my back against the cold tiles of my bathroom floor, willing myself not to cry. Everything will be okay this time. This time, it’ll be different. As the site loaded, my score displayed in bright blue numbers.
Fuck.
My heart dropped to my stomach as I let it wash over me. I slammed my laptop shut. I got up as tears streamed down my face, my arms drawled over my head, attempting to slow my heaves as I choked on my own breath. I leaned over the sink as my body shook; my bare shoulder blades pressed together. Stop it. Not again. I felt my stomach churn as nausea crept up on me, rejecting my incompetency, rejecting my weakness.
I might seem a little dramatic, but to be clear, I’ve never cried like that before. Not when I found out my boyfriend cheated on me, not when I got clocked in the temple with a field hockey stick, not when my best friend told me she didn’t love me anymore. Trust me, I’ve cried hard. But not like this. Never like this.
I threw up in the toilet bowl, my hand gripping the side of the seat as I lost control of my body. It was disgusting, how helpless I looked. I cleaned the mascara, snot, and tears off of my face. I put on a red dress and pulled my hair back as my ride flashed his headlights through my window. I don’t have time for this shit, I thought to myself. I broke down in the car anyway.
“You don’t understand—this is everything to me. It means everything.” I said between tears, clutching my chest as his eyes darted back and forth, his usual so-sure-what-to-do demeanor disappearing. It was almost comical. If I could breathe, I probably would have laughed.
“Alyssa, please, I know you. I know you are more than this. You can do more than this.”
“Even after everything, I don’t know why I can’t just get this one thing right. This one fucking thing.” I choked out between my shallow breaths.
I haven’t always been this way. Growing up, my relatives valued intellect above all else. They looked at my STEM-brained sister and my prodigal cousins, and they saw genius—they saw a future. I was never told I was very smart. I couldn’t memorize my times tables, I couldn’t speak Mandarin without a horrible Westerner accent, and I was never a natural. So, I fooled a generation of tiger moms into thinking that I didn’t need to be bright in intellect if I could be bright everywhere else. I flaunted doe eyes and a ceaseless smile; my manufactured stupidity prompting laughter and cooing from my audience. I told myself I had to love it; I had to compensate for my inferiority. If I wanted to even come close to competing, I had to keep them looking at me.
I leaned right into it. I bleached my hair blonde. I captained my cheerleading team. I was hopelessly affectionate to my friends and my teachers, embodying every super-sweet-stupid-girl stereotype I could think of. I have always been a good actress. I breezed through most of my classes with some charm and laughter at bad jokes, climbed to the top of the social ladder by hooking up with popular boys and making out with girlfriends at parties. I got my fix of attention with internet fame. I almost always got what I wanted, and it was like I didn’t even have to try.
In the summer of my sophomore year, I fell in love with a certain very out-of-reach elite university, and like everything else in my life, I needed to have it. But this was different. Over and over, I was told no. I was told I couldn’t do it, that I just didn’t have it; that I had something to prove.
I snapped. I bought a really thick book. One book turned into two. Two turned into ten. Ten turned into twenty-four. I taught myself the entire SAT curriculum from scratch. For our Canadian readers, the SAT exam consists of four parts: a 65-minute reading section, a 35-minute writing section, a 25-minute no-calculator math section, and a 55-minute calculator section. Hell, right? My biggest challenge was math. I was bad. Like, really bad, like, cannot subtract and cannot memorize times tables type of bad. I had barely any foundational knowledge and my brain turned into an embarrassing pile of mush whenever numbers came into question. I spent the first six months reading the textbook and teaching myself unit by unit, line by line. At times, I kept falling asleep at the table, so I filled a spray bottle with ice water, prompting my mother to squirt it at me if she ever caught my head down.
I drilled practice test after practice test, committing all forty-six available passages to memory. I spent nearly all of my time chewing the end of a pen, hunched over a table, my feet dangling numb off of a chair that was too big for my body. I lived off of black coffee and starved myself when I got questions wrong, punishing my chronic incompetence, like I could purge myself of it.
The SATs were just a gateway drug. I measured my intelligence with test scores and bubble sheets, believing that I could prove to everyone, to my sister, my friends, and myself that I could be successful if I could just get this one thing right. I squeezed my eyes shut when my head throbbed as I studied, telling myself this was the only way I could get out of this stupid town -telling myself that I would be good enough, if I could just get this one thing right.
I developed a complex.
Inadequacy disgusted me, so much that I grew nauseous, perpetually plagued by my ineptitude. In comparison to my friends, the geniuses who surrounded me and were told they were incredible their entire lives, I was nothing. My efforts were meaningless if fruitless. The things I did in hours, they could do in minutes. What good was it anyway?
I thought taking that test would be the end of it. I tried to wash myself clean, collecting all twenty-four books, scattered across my house. Most commonly, they reside on the high table beside my piano, stashed in the Ikea shelves of my bedroom, and hidden under the sink in the kitchen. As I flipped through the pages, I could almost see it, myself, months ago, engraved into the pages.
I saw the marks of red ink where I got answers wrong, slashed across pages so hard the paper ripped. I ran my fingers over the rippled paper, salt absorbed into the surface. I read the notes written in the margins, my rhetoric reminiscent of a tiger mother’s—maybe even harsher.
I stacked the books on the floor, sitting with my legs crossed next to them, like a child awaiting instructions. They were picked up a couple of minutes afterward to be dropped off at our local recycling center. In a weird way, it was sad to see them go. Something that once had so much power over me, that once invoked so much anger and helplessness—was just a stack of paper. I almost felt bad for them. Without my devotion, they didn’t have anything.
But I do.
Even in my failures, my slashes and bruises, I still want to be great. My hunger is yet to be satisfied. I can throw away my books and whine about my tragedy all I want — but I can’t go back now. I can be brilliant, or I can die on this hill.
If this, if the crying and the complexes and nausea is what it takes, then so be it.