The Day I Truly Failed

Choosing a career is one of life's more important decisions. Very often, for a variety of reasons, in my part of the world, this is not a decision one has absolute freedom to make. Quality education in Pakistan, especially if you intend to attend a private institution, is not always something a middle class family with multiple children can afford easily. Conversely, any field that has the impression of being well paid or otherwise (regardless of whether or not this impression is correct) always influences the decision making process. But economic viability is rarely the biggest reason why many young people in Pakistan are forced to abandon their dreams.

This disaffiliation is often fueled by something that appears on the face much less simpler, but is in fact much more sinister. I'm talking about an inherent culture of undermining the whole thought process of dreaming. Almost from early childhood, family and friends will try, sometimes compulsorily, to tone down and re-shaped your aspirations. Young, innocent minds are relentlessly fed with misplaced ideologies that deem some professions noble and others dishonorable, as if even talking about them was a cardinal sin.

Doctors are the saviors of the world in this philosophy, yet if your child suggests that she or he would like to be a nurse they ought to have dropped their mind somewhere (even when ironically nurses are professionals belonging to the same field of medicine). Engineers, MBAs and Computer Science graduates are intelligent, gifted people, who earn five figure salaries, but lawyers, writers, journalists, beauticians, fashion designers, chefs, and a whole array of other so-called unconventional fields, no sir, these professions are only respectable so long as your child doesn't want to be in them, especially if your child happens to be a girl.

Even the well educated in Pakistan depict such prejudiced reservations about certain fields and who can enter them. If somehow you happen to be one of those people who has resisted this metamorphosis of your mindset in your early childhood, an ideological struggle against these misplaced social norms awaits you for the rest of your life. Your own interests, skills and aptitude, your development needs and way of thinking, all this counts for little in front of these social norms. Any reliable career counseling service outside of Pakistan would tell you the importance of self-assessment and motivation. Not in Pakistan.

Because career counseling at school and college level is a non-existent phenomenon, the only advice you receive is from your ever-so-considerate and mammoth circle of family and friends. Not only will they offer their services without you asking for them, they will also be mighty offended if you don't take their recommendations. It is the not the love and concern of our elders that aspiring youth like me are questioning. Contrary to what our elders may think, we value this love and concern they show for us, and we even respect the lessons their experience of life has taught them.

But I have struggled to understand why we must confine our self to the lessons they have learned, why we cannot have the freedom to learn from our own life's experiences as we live it? And why our respect of our elders must be called into question if we dare do dare to disagree with the lessons they have learned? Must rebellion be always frowned upon?

The youth of this country wants to grow and prosper, I want to grow and prosper too, I have dreams, I want to follow them, and see what my dreams hold for me. Our elders, my elders, also want me to grow and prosper, but they also have dreams of their own for us. It stays calm if our dreams aren't conflicting with theirs, but if they do differ, why must we, the portrayers of these dreams, be the ones to abandon our possibilities? My elders have raised me up encouraging me to think - if that hadn't been the case I'd not have been writing this today - yet whenever that ability to think, which they have instilled in me with their upbringing, enables me to think differently, there is either an uncomfortable silence between us, or a rowdy disagreement. I struggle every day to comprehend why this should be so.

Today I am struggling again. The results of my first professional B.D.S. examinations come out today. It is neither with pride, not with any regret, that I tell you that I failed these exams. I don't know yet how many papers I failed to clear, but I am a reluctant dentistry student, the exams meant little to me, so it doesn't matter either way. Yet still, there is a tinge of regret I feel every time I am informed of a result from this dentistry programme I am subjecting my self to. It is not the failure in an exam, test or assessment that disheartens me, but the continued failure to disassociate myself from the very social norms I hate so much. I don't say dentistry isn't a noble profession, but it just isn't for me.

Every subsequent dentistry exam from that day nearly two years ago when I enrolled in this dentistry program giving up my dreams of studying journalism, is another grave, painful reminder of that fateful day. That day when I succumbed to family and social pressure, that day when I gave up on my dreams, that was the day I truly failed. And today? Today is merely another anniversary of that epic failure. But what is this article in itself? A purposeless admission of failure, another obituary of my dreams or merely another sigh of regret, even I don't know for sure. But either way, there is a lingering hope that if not myself, someone somewhere else can draw something from this chronology of my failure(s) and not make the same mistake(s) that I did. May all our dreams come true.

One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king."-Abraham Maslow