How to Crush the Right Way

01 ¦ meet me

01 : meet me

Tate McRae - teenage mind

'what have we come to now? We all wanna be like the rest'

×

A FEW of us teenagers, want to succeed in everything we do. Whether it be at school, sports or engaging with a crowd, we want to nail it. Some of us manage to pull everything off and the rest of us? We just sit in the crowd and applaud, feeling just a slight bit of jealousy and wondering why we weren't blessed with that kind of talent.

I was always the one who sat amongst all the other learners, congratulating the winners in various sectors of the school body. Sometimes I sat and wondered what my purpose on this Earth was. There must have been something either than finishing snacks that I was good at. Unlike many people I knew, God didn't bless me with any talent, brains or looks.

At our school, there was this one girl, Eliza. She was gorgeously tall with tan skin, beautiful, grey eyes that frequently changed colour, smart, athletic and kind-hearted. She was blessed with everything in the book and I couldn't even score at least one good attribute. The sad thing about life is that we either score big or we don't score at all and my life was the latter.

"Jo, Ash," I averted my eyes from the stage where Rethabile was saying her speech about teenagers.

Girls from Truth College were seriously gifted to the point where it made the rest of us feel like advertisements on the walls of buildings in downtown Springs. To the outsiders, Truth College was the best school in Lydenburg, it was; in terms of what it had to offer but it was sure excellent in making the other people - including me, feel stupid and as if we lacked talent.

It was easy for the principal to stand up on the stand and boast about our ballet dancers going places, people who excelled in Maths, swimmers who brought home victories and piano players who made parents second guess their children's abilities.

"Ash," the voice said next to me and I snapped out of my daze and looked at the person talking next to me.

"Can you hear what she's saying?" Simmy questioned and I nodded, giving her a brief, forced smile.

I honestly did not care about what she saying. We were all going to applaud in the end regardless of how unrealistic and unrelatable it was.

"It's awesome dude, like awesome," I heard her mutter beside me after I had turned my head back to the stage.

I internally groaned at her statement and tried thinking about something else other than Rethabile's speech. When I first heard her speaking in the eighth grade, I knew that she was blessed with the talent for words.

But hearing the same person speak all the time was getting mundane.

My life was pretty bland. I didn't do sports, was never picked for the public speaking team, was too lazy to do debating, I could not draw and I was too much of a coward to audition for the choir. I was one of those average girls who managed to score exactly an 80 percent on their last term mark so they can make it to the academic awards. Even though I hated going to the awards, watching everyone else get called up at least two times whilst I went up to get a lousy certificate was saddening.I still wanted my parents to see that I was capable of doing more than just binge watch Marvel's Runaways. One thing my parents were absolute best at was comparing me with other people and that happened at every award ceremony that I've been to - Primary school included.