We
stress, we smile anyway.
“I’m okay”
Is the most common lie every person must’ve said in his/her life.
That’s probably when backlogs rise, people expect something heavier than we can
carry. There’s a phase in everyone’s life where we run on 4-hour sleep and try
to perform like a robot.
We walk into school with hollow happiness and
strength, laughing with friends, posting stories that make life look absolutely
perfect.
But behind that smile, there is stress, pressure and a constant fear of not
matching with others. Somewhere along the way, we didn’t ‘just’ learn subjects,
we learned to hide our stress behind a smile.
Daily pressure compels us to not to open up with the
fear of being judged and termed as ‘weak’ by the society and sometimes even our
friends.
[“a student in India dies by
suicide every 42 minutes, highlighting a deepening crisis of academic pressure
and mental health neglect.”] – The Times of India report.
Ideally,
a child must live in a vacuum, the irony is he/she lives in a high-pressure
cooker where the whistle never blows… For a 10th or a 12th grader in India,
there are stereotypes set as per the marks they score. A kid scoring 95% in
boards is often asked to pursue Science group.
It is a
gruelling cycle of school hours, followed by coaching shops, capped off with
late night self-studies.
We are told this is the hustle required for success, but rarely do we discuss
the toll it takes on the person behind the admission number.
It is
never just the weight of books, it’s the weight of the ‘comparison’ that has
been digitized through social media and merit list. “Is a child not doing
enough?” The constant state of being judged and compared by hundreds of
relatives and most importantly “SELF-DOUBT”.
With
this we have normalized anxiety and stress as a prerequisite for achievement.
We have started believing that if we aren’t stressed then we might not be
working hard enough.
THERE IS A VERY THIN LINE BETWEEN DISCIPLINED EFFORT AND A COMPLETE EMOTIONAL COLLAPSE, and many have already been crossed under the guise of “healthy competition”.
This
pressure doesn’t stop at a student’s study table. It is a radiation into the
home. For parents and teachers, the “smile” is often a shared one. Adults carry
the burden of wanting the best for their children. Often equating academic
security with survival.
In a
country like ours, where competition is a survival instinct, a parent’s anxiety
is just their love dressed up in a suit of worry. They push because they are
scared of a world that doesn’t forgive a low rank. But in this process, the
dining table slowly turns into a second coaching desk where every conversation
is about the next mock test or the rising cut-offs. We need to realize that
parents are also running a race they didn't sign up for, trying to measure
their success as providers by the percentages on our report cards. They smile
to stay strong for us, and we smile to not disappoint them, creating a house
full of people who are all holding their breath at the same time.
Then
there is the messy, complicated world of teen relationships. We are at an age
where our friends are our entire world, yet we treat each other like academic
rivals. We walk the school corridors together, sharing memes and lunch, but we hesitate
to share the fact that we cried last night over a physics chapter. There’s this
unspoken fear that if we show a crack in our armour, we’ll be labelled as
"weak" or "not serious enough" for the goals we’ve set.
Even in love, it’s a silent storm. One-sided feelings, heartbreaks, and the
confusion of growing up are pushed into the corner because "boards are
more important." We are becoming a generation that is socially connected
but emotionally isolated, laughing in group photos while feeling utterly alone
in our heads.
If we
keep going like this, the "smile" won’t just be a mask anymore, it
will become a scar. Chronic stress isn't just a mood; it’s a slow erosion of
our actual potential. When you run on 4-hour sleep and constant cortisol, your
brain stops being the sharp tool needed for IIT or NEET and starts becoming a
foggy, exhausted machine. We see it in the rising aggression, the insomnia, and
that "zombie" feeling where you’re physically present in class but
mentally miles away, drowning in backlogs. We are engineering high-scorers, but
we might be losing the very humans inside them.
The
solution isn't to stop dreaming or stop working hard. It’s about changing how
we measure a "good day." For parents, it could be as simple as having
one meal a day where marks and coaching are banned topics. For us students, it
means looking at a friend not as a competitor to beat, but as a teammate to
carry. We need "Project Awaazz" a real awareness where we stop
grading handwriting and start noticing heartbreak. Schools shouldn't just be
places where we learn subjects; they should be places where we learn to stay
steady.
At the
end of the day, a rank is just a number on a piece of paper, but a healthy mind
is the foundation for everything we want to build. We’re going to prove that
you can chase the biggest goals in the world without losing yourself in the
process. It’s time to stop pretending everything is fine and actually make it
fine. Let’s keep the hustle, but let’s finally lose the mask. No more hollow
happiness. No more silent battles. Just real support, real talk, and a smile
that actually means what it says.
Because maybe the goal was never to remove the
pressure completely, but to make sure it doesn’t take away who we are…
Maybe
success isn’t just about ranks, colleges, or cut-offs, but about reaching there
without breaking ourselves in the process.
And
maybe, just maybe, the next time someone says “I’m okay,” we pause for a second
and actually mean it when we ask, “Are you really?”
Because
behind every smile, there’s a story, and it deserves to be heard, not hidden.
Written by
Chetan Kumar Grover
