I, a 19 years old, am at the crossroads where nothing I choose is gonna end well
Hi everyone, I'm a Vietnamese boy and my entire life I have been told by my family that I'm the smartest, and that I am meant for greatness. Even though my family acts like I just gotta do my thing, I know deep down they want me to succeed and break my family struggle. As a kid constantly told by adults that I am the chosen one, I developed some kind of identity that I am the smart kid and should therefore go in the directions of maths, or science of sort related jobs and that I have to excel at said jobs to be rich, and to fully carry the weights of my family on my very shoulder. For context, in Vietnam, if you're bad at studying, your chances of actually growing is effectively zero, which results in the studying rush in which kids have to study an insane amount of Maths just to catch up with everyone else. Luckily for me, I'm a little bit smarter, and that my academic journey has started well, but things started to change when I first entered middle school, which is grade 6 for everyone who's wondering. 5 years in primary school I have done everything that my mom has told me to do, win first prizes, play piano, dances. I excel at maths as well, but only because I was sort of good at it, and I wanted to make my mom proud, but my head is always yearning for stories in books. Every time I did something well, I asked for not toys, not clothes or food, but stories, coming from a book of tales for children. I loved it. All those wonderful days only to encounter my first ever shock in my entire life in middle school. I was lonely, very, very lonely. They called me stupid, gay and that I'm a nerd, a dork and every single bad nicknames that man has to think of. I had no choice but to go on the Internet for the first time in my life to play multiplayers games with the sole purpose of just getting to find a friend. I found out that I really liked games and meeting friends on such games, so I kept on playing and met more friends and had my adventures with them. I felt alive. But as I was too focused on playing games my grades naturally fell and eventually hit rock bottom on grade 7. Asian parents are notorious for hating video games and my mom is no exception, and instead of blaming the very fact that I was bullied, she blamed my video games and cut them off for several years and forced me to re-enter the grind. I started to have classes even at evenings until 11pm for the next two years, succeeded to get into highschool with flying colours, but I'm getting very, very tired. I was sick of everything. Every time I fail at Maths, my mom would just cram me more with classes and classes, studying a subject which I has lost the spark of for years, and just because I was a smart kid and spent grueling weeks just to get in a school, she thought it was the way to it all. My highschool years were no different, I was falling behind because school gave me no spark anymore, I walked to school with every cell of my body hating it. and I didn't complain. My grades fell again, and more classes and all of that to once again succeeding in getting in college. but that getting in college was not to any of my satisfaction. I tried killing myself for several times because of the sheer pressure that I had to endure doing what I despise for years, and to be ignored every single time of my art dreams because it's "just bullshit". And I get it, I do not have much artistic talent, all I have is my imagination and my love for stories that are to be told, and that living the life of an artist means poverty and risks and that I would be outcasted by the world. I am now in college and I just passed my first year, sort of, failing two calculus classes and a physics class, barely passing any other classes except those "bullshit" classes of presentation (which I pride myself on) and English (because I'm literally talking to you right now in it). Naturally, I have to retake my calculus classes to pass, but my mom insists that because I wanted to do things in my own way, and I failed to shit, I then have to take more of her private tutor lessons in order to "pass with flying colours". Mind you, I have already had 6 calculus lectures of 3 hours each not counting the sheer workload of homework and revision. Before any of you say it's not bad enough, my mom is even planning to make me retake every single class that I didn't pass with high grades, only for me to get a good degree to get out of this school. Every. single. one of them. That's the situation I'm in. Let's talk a bit about my inner world in my head. I just love literature, those that you call the classic pieces of literature of the world, like those of Shakespeare or my people's books that describes the lives of people, the struggles they go through and the beautiful messages in every single one of them. Animes in media are also of my interest, because of how spectacular they look, how awesome and lively they feel and just how creative of them to be. I also love pieces of music that make me fall into my world of imaginations, fields of flowers, forests of dreams, citys built by people and lots of other things. I love art, and I have always do. Along my life of academics, I have always tried to slip in some of my artistic interests for the purpose of just helping my inner child have a place to run free of all those troubles and maybe just giving me a chance to breathe. I've always asked mom for art classes, and she actually does give me some art classes as I was growing up, but such classes are always later dismissed because art is expensive. I never gave up and that dream, and silly me to think that I'd just studying all of these, and when I get rich, I can finally have those money to myself to play more beautiful pieces of music, write spectacular stories and draw the most mesmerising scenes known to man. I lied to myself, and my mom, for a long, long time. I am currently very, very tired with what I'm having right now. Either I have to keep going with my mom's plan and work my soul away on some AI major bullshit that I couldn't care less about, or risk it all studying arts, just for my freedom. I want my life's doings to be of art, and I have in fact secretly written my notes, thoughts and even practiced drawing secretly in all those times she thinks I'm spending on my school work (I didn't, I just do the bare minimum in order to pass because of how much bullshit calculus is and how utterly pointless this subject is, hell, those entire major is). I have been doing arts, I love it, and even when I suck at art because I have no money to find a teacher, I would work and save up for my art stuff and just secretly taking classes behind her back, just to feel alive. Changing major is not an option because of our education system, and perhaps it's not an option anywhere else, since my entire life I have chosen to sacrifice for arts, and, ironically enough, is now about science stuff. I could just do bare minimum to pass but then what about the mission to break my family's struggle with a (dare I say) "more stable" job?
I'm just lost. I'm just lonely and honestly I feel like I don't have a choice but just keep suffering like this
Posted Jul 13, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC