Day 1 of Kindergarten. Waiting for my school bus, I was sitting on my Winnie the Pooh bedsheet, with the aftertaste of the minty kids’ toothpaste still afresh in my mouth. With a haphazardly arranged bowtie dangling from my collar, the theme song from Mickey Mouse echoed through my yellow-walled bedroom at full volume. Eyes wide with excitement, I gripped my favorite yellow bowl full of chocos and warm milk as I watched. My mother was busy packing notebooks neatly covered with brown paper and sheer tape while my dad ensured my shirt was perfectly ironed.
It is safe to say I was one of the few nutcases who genuinely loved school. Naturally, that served as the perfect precedent for me to become the resident know-it-all and the annoying teacher’s pet. Pfftt, like I cared… My curiosity turned everything into a game—always chasing the whys and hows of life. Those little glittering stickers slapped onto my notebook by my teachers were like little stamps of approval. They were my badges of honor that I would prance around with in my worn out yellow school bus. Every Parent Teacher Meeting would be an ego boost for me. “Amandeep has tremendous amounts of potential,” they all said. I knew I had to go after it, so there I began. No parental pressure, no forced fires, it was just my stubbornness to exhaust the limits of this “full potential.”
The rush of being competitive consumed me. Every win was a new high, and each goal was a gameplan to becoming the best. The yellows had started to grow bleaker and bleaker. Even the sun began to feel …irritating. Layers of high-SPF sunscreen became a second skin. Oh, and my post-exam season tradition of ordering in my favorite paprika pizza was reduced to just a number — 288 calories and nothing more. Like a hamster on a wheel, I was fueled by one aspiration after another. Just one more accomplishment. One more award. Maybe then it would all feel worth it.
My yellows had finally turned sour. It was now all about the green. The peppermint tea had replaced my juicebox of Frooti. I began turning down guilty sweet pleasures for shoddy salad recipes from Pinterest. Filling up Google Forms upon Google Forms to get a hold of some internship stipend. Checking all boxes on my productivity tracking excel. I was doing everything right; I was doing everything by the book. However, in that arbitrary chase I realized that this wasn’t even the basis of MY happiness. It is what had been progressively thrust upon me, by no one else but myself, and that was the worst part. I should’ve felt like I was on top of the world, taking my multitasking in stride, yet it still didn’t feel enough. It still didn’t feel like I had come far enough. The green was a mirage I kept chasing. I was in a perpetual state of exhaustion, pushing through each day. Until one day my legs gave out, and I stopped.
No changes happen overnight. Let’s please skip over the part where I stuffed my face with ice cream, binge-watched Netflix, and set my body clock to a completely different Time Zone. Having an emo nostalgic slump wasn’t exactly on my bingo card for this year. Going through old pictures of myself, stashed away in some folder on my pendrive, I stared dead at my screen for a solid 15 minutes in what was a mix of agony and awe. I saw the glimmer of the simplest, most unbridled happiness in that tiny Amandeep.
I wondered—how far yellow could be from the shades of green in the palette of life? I had no idea where to begin. For starters, I actually tried waking up for breakfast and not rushing for my classes. The Winnie the Pooh bedsheets weren’t exactly there, and it was a queue of all groggy people, but hey, I at least got my Chocos from the dining hall. Soon enough, I went out for a walk without a mental map in my mind, and no sunscreen this time. Boy oh boy, I felt like holding onto this fleeting feeling of happiness with every fiber of my being. It was refreshing to not look at my entire day jammed into a Google Calendar, for once. This is when it hit me. There is no point in filling up all empty spaces in my resume, by making no space for myself at all. It didn’t have to be yellow vs. green — why not a blend of chartreuse to carry me forward. So, even if this year, the Pondi trip doesn’t make it out of the groupchat, I can at least make it out of my sophomore slump. Sometimes, you don’t have to chase, but just soak in your surroundings and enjoy the ride.