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I'm a 17-year-old Indian girl, and well, my life is kind of a mess right now.
Oooook, so I'm pure South Indian. Completely born and raised in Tamil Nadu and Andhra. Two years ago, right after my 10th boards, my parents, with absolutely no heads-up, whisked me and my brother away to Gujarat in North India.
Well, gee, thanks again, Mom.
They got a nice job there, okay, I understand that. But I also had to move away from my home of fourteen years, away from my family and friends, away from everyone I'd ever known, to a place where I didn't even know the language.
And when I say it was my personal hell, I mean it.
Let me just tell you that in the city I was in, Vadodara, every fucking school, literally every school, taught in Hindi and only in Hindi. Seriously. They taught even English in Hindi. And I, for the love of God, couldn't speak or understand Hindi even if my life depended on it.
You can kind of guess everything from there.
I sucked at school because I genuinely didn't understand a single thing they taught. I had no friends and no social life because, surprise, almost none of the students could speak English. Rage bait, I tell you.
And well, I did what any normal teenager my age would do.
I started skipping school as much as I could.
I drowned myself in my phone and laptop. Webnovels, songs, anime, Roblox, and a whole lot of BL.
Yeah.
Oh, and I also had to pretend to my parents that I was studying well.
A year went by like that.
I got 55% in 11th grade.
Big surprise.
My mom was guilty for maybe two minutes before she started blaming me for not learning Hindi. But, to her credit, she did put me in online classes.
Not that it made much of a difference.
My physics teacher basically sat in front of the camera and kept telling me to read the textbook. My maths teacher was the same, somehow worse. My chemistry teacher was actually quite nice and taught well, but by then the damage was already done.
Then came 12th grade.
The most important year of my life.
And I still had no idea what a function was in maths or what half the laws of physics even meant.
Aaaaand, surprise surprise, I failed maths.
And by some miracle from the heavens above, I somehow passed physics.
My parents were devastated, of course.
My brother failed too.
Highlight of the story: we both used to get amazing marks back in our schools in the South, so we certainly aren't dumb.
Eventually, my parents understood that this disaster wasn't entirely our fault and moved us back to South India.
That guilt lasted about three days.
Then my phone and laptop were taken away, and my brother wasn't allowed to play on his PS anymore.
Like, literally, I have nothing now.
I'm writing this from my Kindle. It's a pain.
But I'm writing this mostly to remind myself that the reason I failed wasn't entirely my fault.
Maybe it was a little.
Maybe I could have learned Hindi like my mom wanted.
But the main reason wasn't that.
I don't know when I'll ever get my phone or laptop back, and if anyone ever asked me whether I'd trade those two years and everything I discovered for better 12th-grade marks...
No.
No, I don't think I would.
Because in those two years, I found everything I love and everything I want to be.
And really, the only thing I'm scared of isn't the problems I'll face in the future.
It's that maybe one day I'll forget the things I love.
I'm scared that one day I'll stop loving deranged BL smut on AO3.
I'm scared that one day I'll forget the fictional men I've fallen in love with: Kim Dokja, Han Yoojin, Yoo Joonghyuk, Lee Hakhyun, Daniel Park, Kim Gong-ja, KDJ's entire constellation of disasters, Cale Henituse, Alberu Crossman, Lloyd Frontera, Kim Suho, Jaehwan, Sung Jinwoo, Yoo Ijin, Arthur Leywin, Kiyotaka Ayanokoji, Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Hua Cheng, Xie Lian, Chu Wanning, Mo Ran, Shen Qingqiu, Luo Binghe, and about a hundred emotionally unavailable men who have permanently altered my brain chemistry.
I'm scared that one day I'll wake up and just won't feel like opening the webnovels I've been following for five years.
I'm terrified that I'd change without even realizing I'm changing.
I'm scared that one day I'll just move on from this part of my life the same way I've moved on from every other phase before it.
But then I think to myself...
Maybe that's okay.
Maybe one day I'll stop rereading the same webnovels. Maybe I'll move on from my favorite characters. Maybe there will come a day when Kim Dokja no longer lives rent-free in my head and when opening AO3 isn't the first thing I want to do after a long day.
And maybe that'll hurt.
But that doesn't mean this part of my life meant any less.
It doesn't mean those stories didn't save me when I needed saving.
It doesn't mean those characters weren't real to me in all the ways that mattered.
And it doesn't mean I'll stop being me.
Because every version of myself that I've ever been is still here somewhere.
The teenager who got dragged across the country and felt like her whole world had ended.
The girl who survived by burying herself in stories.
They're all me.
Maybe growing up isn't losing pieces of yourself.
Maybe it's carrying them with you.
So even if things are hard right now, even if I've failed exams and have no idea what my future looks like, I still love who I am.
And if you're reading this because you've felt the same way, because you're scared of changing, scared of failing, scared of losing the things you love, then I hope you don't give up.
I can't promise that everything will stay the same.
In fact, it won't.
But I think things get better.
Not all at once. Not in some magical movie ending kind of way.
Just little by little.
One new friend.
One new obsession.
One good day after a hundred bad ones.
And before you know it, you've made it somewhere you never thought you'd reach.
So for now, I'll keep moving forward.
I'll keep loving the stories I love.
And when the next chapter comes, I'll read that one too.