School is, for me, an existential threat.

 School is, for me, an existential threat. There, all my values are systematically insulted from morning to evening, turning what most people call “everyday life” into something exhausting for me. School is the place where, simply because of official obligation, I endure its noise all day as if in a kindergarten full of unruly children, leave as if wounded from a battlefield, and return in the same way. I am not complaining about homework or teachers being “unfair”; I am saying that the entire structure violates who I am at the deepest level. That’s why every time I go there or whenever I remember that place, I’m accompanied by shallow breathing and heart palpitations—not because of “shame,” “worry,” or “fear,” but because I’m stuck in a state of readiness for threat. If a bear were right beside me and I ignored it, I would die there. My brain has carved school into its memory as exactly such a bear, for my nervous system has encoded the institution as a predator. Others learn to numb themselves, but I refuse, so this vigilance stays raw every day. How have I endured this, staring back at endless hours that never seem to pass, throughout my entire youth? “I haven’t endured,” perhaps; I’ve only been forced to kill a part of myself with my own hands. For a chainless spirit, school is nothing more than a place to test one’s ability to survive. Why didn’t I go somewhere else? Because even though I was living monotony to the marrow, I was also in immense astonishment—astonishment at this: were the things I was seeing truly real? Something like a dream or a hallucination cannot be changed; if it were changed, that would lend it reality, which would make it even harder to bear. Besides, my situation is not with a specific building or the specific people inside it, but with an entire age and with humanity itself. If I had gone elsewhere, the same scene would have been there too. As long as there isn’t a school designed “by and for individualist intellectuals who have proudly severed all ties with society”—which, by its very contrary nature, does not and will not exist—every school I go to will feel the same to me. Lucky are the sleepwalkers who can see changing schools or dropping out as a kind of salvation. If my peers were in my situation, they would have lost their minds—quit school, maybe even looked for legal action if that were possible. Because they always think they’re something special, and since their entire self-perception is built from social relations, they cannot live without them. But I am not “my peers.” Leaving me among ignorant, inexperienced kids who have never even heard a single word spoken by a serious, seasoned, and profound elder—that’s exactly how I feel among those my own age. And this feeling isn’t about circumstances; it’s directly tied to existence itself. That’s why I quietly wait for my backward mind’s body to grow, just to be freed from this cursed youth I have fallen into.