Am I not good enough?
I stare down at the email on my phone as I sit in my dimly lit room, desperately trying not to cry.
Confusion, anger, fear, doubt, and panic control my entire body.
I tried hard, so hard. I tried harder than a caffeinated squirrel trying to get out of a man-made backyard maze. Slowly as the anger subsides, a wave of disappointment and self-doubt sweeps over me. I spent hours working on this “relationship.” I did everything humanly possible to make sense of this situation.
Do these sacrifices, these hours, nights, and days boil down to nothing? Are my efforts not worth anything at all? As my brain continues to mess me up with all these questions, I read the email over and over again. I feel the knots in my stomach tighten with each word I read. Nausea hits me.
This was a glaring reminder that passion alone can never be worthy. But this grief is not new to me. Everything I ever love, everything I am immensely passionate about, eventually lets me down.
While still processing the heartbreak, I go back to the time when I first met my heartbreaker, the one and only….drumroll…. microeconomics. Yep, you read that right.
It all started back in the 9th grade when I was an excited, starry-eyed, believer of unicorns and seeker of rainbows.
Picture this: I am sitting in the section C classroom and there my eyes fall upon it for the first time: microeconomics. Tall, dark, broody, and extremely intellectual. The possessor of all worldly knowledge. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, even in history class when we were supposed to be learning about the Second World War. I was in complete awe of it.
Over the course of my time at school, I became more obsessed. This one subject could explain consumer choices during the time of the great depression simply through good old demand and supply. It became the invisible hand in my life.
However, the complications began when I entered university.
My first semester here was like a country song artist: sad, lonely, and a little off-key. I had to let go of microeconomics or economics in general because of the compulsory foundational courses.
In hindsight, that disconnection, that period of isolation was really good for me. I was able to focus on things other than well, supply and demand.
But I could not keep running away from it for long.
Next semester, we rekindled our romance and it felt like we were back in the “honeymoon phase” all over again. I was obsessing over it like the 13-year-old me obsessing over One Direction.
The downfall of our relationship started in the third semester. Microeconomics demanded too much time from me. It got too complex. I almost stopped hanging out with my friends and gave all my undivided attention to it. However, with each passing moment I spent with it, I felt as useless and unworthy as the broken vending machine in the RH2 lobby.
And the email containing my assignment grade is just another consequence of this cursed passion.
I am jolted back to reality when my roommate walks into the room. She sees me visibly disturbed, walks over to my desk and peeks into my phone.
“B- is not a bad grade Varusha.”
I look up at her, unshed tears stinging my eyes.
“But I put so much effort into the assignments. And I just can’t seem to get anything above a B. No matter what I do!”
“I think you are overreacting. This is just an assignment. Stop acting like you are in a Taylor Swift breakup song,”
But for me, this was worse than a breakup song. I keep running after a subject, a f*****g subject, with all my might, and it only keeps moving further away from me.
If microeconomics is my boyfriend and this is a relationship, then it definitely an extremely toxic one.
(P.S. Apologies to 25-year-old Varusha who will cringe with every fibre in her body when she reads this. 19-year-old me is definitely teetering on the edge of delusion. Personifying microeconomics as her boyfriend and writing 700 words about it? Delulu to the core.)