toppers barely win in life because the schooling system rewards them for following instructions perfectly. a kid who spends 15 years getting marks for doing exactly what the teacher wants does build a fragile relationship with open-ended failure. and real life doesn’t work like this and doesnt hand you a syllabus.
when sylvia plath wrote ‘please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. there are times when i will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand’ I felt that