In Between
Pinakabobo sa mga Matatalino
by Sophie Echivarre
“Mas pipiliin mo bang maging pinakamatalino sa mga bobo, o pinakabobo sa mga matatalino?”
Even if you weren’t a Filipino elementary student in the 2000s, you’ve probably been asked something like this before. Whenever it comes up, I answer that I’d rather be a fool among more intelligent peers as I do learn from them. It’s an answer I stand by, and I’ve carried this mindset with me during my stay in the UP system, which I was told all my life was the ‘intellectual home’. I’ve come to accept this with a healthy helping of skepticism, but no matter how many content critical of the university I share on Facebook, one of the best things about being here is meeting friends that push me to be better. But all growth comes at a cost, and the cost of growing with so many brilliant people is that at my lowest points, I feel that I’m the worst of the best. And the worst of the best is a terrible place to be. My closest friends reassure me that much of it is because of factors beyond my control. Nobody could have anticipated my late teens and early twenties would be marked by mental health difficulties, then the worst public health crisis I’ve lived through. Attending educational discussions and mobilizations has taught me enough that our struggles go beyond individual moral failings. The commercialized, cutthroat system we live under is cruel, and everybody is bound to feel its sting. I’ve also never been one to compare myself to others, but it’s still so heartbreaking scrolling through the sablay photos every July to August, wondering when the sunflowers will bloom for me.
Everything I’ve learned and everyone I know tells me it’s not my fault. So why do I still feel like it is? Why do I still feel that by being “the worst of the best,” I’m disappointing someone by failing to live up to expectations, even if I know those expectations have always been fundamentally unjust?
It’s difficult to shed the individualistic mindset you’ve grown up in an achievement-conscious society, even when you learn that it’s not you, it’s them. By them, I mean big capitalists and politicians who would much rather export us as cheap labor, exploit us as contractual workers, or hire us as corporate slaves, then discard us once we’re no longer useful. Neoliberal education encourages us to compete in preparation for a cutthroat job market; a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society teaches us that good grades and job offers are our only safety net sans community care; and those who govern our country teach us to compete because we are more easily controlled when divided rather than when we’re organized. There’s no time to be kind to yourself when achievement is the price you pay to escape poverty or be welcomed by the ruling class as one of them. It serves the interest of the ruling class to individualize failure just as it individualizes success.
Despite knowing these facts about society intellectually, the idea that we have to deserve a quality education remains ever-present. It continues to haunt many of us well into adulthood. It costs us our health and has cost some members of the UP community their lives. Even when we make it out alive and seemingly successful, we often end up passing this thinking on to our children even if we do so with the best intentions of “preparing them for the world.”
The worst part is that this trickles down to the ways we rationalize our feelings of inadequacy or use our failures as a stick to beat ourselves with. We see memes about the “former gifted kid burnout,” we hear from our parents and professors that university just has different demands from high school, and we even read pieces about university admissions somehow being a “great equalizer” that magically eliminates external barriers to excellence. Given this very individualistic lens, it’s no wonder we blame ourselves when we realize we’re the “worst of the best.” There’s no need for a tiger mother to make you feel horrible about yourself when society at large and even your own internal monologue tell you you’ll never be enough.
I don’t know how to break out of this cycle, but if we choose to acknowledge that all of us have felt we’re the worst of the best at one time or another, I believe we eventually will. All of us have an inner burnt-out child who has been sold a deeply flawed dream by neoliberal education, and the best way to honor that child is to work towards a different dream. We, and the children we will someday have, deserve a world where we admit we don’t have all the answers, where we learn from each other, and where we appreciate each other’s brilliance without feeling that being the best is the price we have to pay to be there.
