Am I the stranger?

When I was in age of 12 I went to Canada with my family under the goal of education. I had horrible adating period for about 6 months in which I had no friends. But after I adjusted to the Canadian way of life, I enjoyed it and just before I left Canada, I thought I was mentally a Canadian too.

The same happened when I came back to Korea. Since I was living the Canadian life, I couldn’t adjust to the Korean way of things. Korean were all about education, success, money, time and all these very important but somehow stressful things.

It’s been more than 4 years since I came to Korea now, but mentally I am not adjusted. 

I have (luckily) got into public school that is one of the top 10 high school in Korea(thanks to little English I know). It was hard enough preparing to get into this school but what came after it is worse.

The thing is that these people who come to this school are like studying muchine. They just study eat sleep wake up and repeat over again. I pictured it before I came in but to actually feel it, it was frightening. Now because of these study muchines, it’s no wonder that I can’t get good enough GPA.

However that’s why I started to ignore subjects that I had no interest in and started to concentrate on certain subjects that had something to do with me and my future. I thought this was normal, but I guess it was just me. Not only my colleagues but also my homeroom teacher started worrying about me.

What the hell? They pity me because I know what I will do in future and study according to it? Most of these kids don’t know what they are going to do and they study just so they can stop worrying about their future! I should pity them! They are wasting their golden period as teen, studying something that they will never again remember nor useful!

Being under such hard pressure reminded me of a story.

There was a monkey, he travelled on his own, and some how he got himself into village of one-eyed monkeys. Although he was normal monkey with two eyes, he was a abnormal being there. So he took one of his eye out. After few years, he started travelling again, and he got himself into the old village where he used to live, where two-eyed monkey was normal, but it was already too late for regrets.

I learnt from this story to never change youself just because the society says so, it is more important that you have your own standards. 

I know that being the two-eyed monkey in this one-eyed village is going to be tough(or maybe I’m the one-eyed in the two-eyed village). But I know that if I live to my standards, I will have my day.