Have you ever wondered at some point of your life as to why should you even pursue your dreams if you are going to fail every time? No matter how hard you try, nothing seems to work in your favour, and you constantly feel yourself to be on the cusp of depression?
I know you have, and so have I, many times! But one such life changing moment happened, when I had just finished my 12th grade in school. Always an artist as a child, I was hoping to enrol in a fashion designing course, but then my father came across this lucrative career option. The said lucrative career included black robes, affluent clientèle, court rooms, and money – loads of it. You might have guessed it by now – my father wanted me to be a lawyer. And I was taken by the glamour. I had never known how different were the Advocates and the Lawyers, and how the court rooms really looked like, what was it like to draft contracts in law firms. It was all a beautiful journey I was about to take.
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But somewhere deep down, my heart refused to accept this change of course. A feeling of proving my worth to others lodged itself in my head. You know how everyone around you expects you to be something, but then you go on and do something entirely opposite, which according to them, “is so not you”. That was happening with me. Weren’t you going to be an artist? A designer? How are you even going to attempt something as difficult as Law?
I believed them, even though I enrolled in a coaching centre and tried to make sense of everything. My mathematics was horrible but I was good at other subjects, and slowly started to make my place among the others. I would rank well in all the mock tests, and the dream to get into National Law Universities kept getting stronger. Ironically, there were fashion designing students in the same institute, who studied with us, but I was focused on law. Completely. Slowly the date of exams came nearer, as I became a zombie. I would study for 18 hours a day, and have no sense of where I was or who I was. In my group, everyone was sure I would make it through.
But when the results came, I was the only one who did not get a National Law University. At that time, there were only 8 Universities in India, and my best friend got into one of the top three. Saying that I was depressed will be an understatement. Everyone’s attitude changed in that instant. The phase of failure was short lived, 6 months or so, but it was like a deep dark dungeon for me. I could not fathom where I went wrong. But now a fire kindled in me. This time I was going to do it for myself. I enrolled myself in a local college into a B.A. with Advertisement course. And then I joined the same coaching again, to find many others who were trying again. This time I would not look at anybody.
I loosened a bit this time. I would enjoy with my friends in college and immediately run to the coaching after college. I would perform well in college, and focus on my weaker areas in law prep. I focused both on myself as well as on my academic performance. Eventually, I cracked a new University called Christ University, Bangalore, and leaped from small town of Bhopal to an entirely new life. You would think I still did not make it to the National Law School, but I believe that life has a funny way to make our dreams come true.
I appeared for LLM (Masters) examination in the CLAT (Common Law Admission Test) and received AIR 141, and finished my Masters in Law last year from National Law University-Odisha (Cuttack). Who would have ever thought that the dreamy average girl would make the cut some day?
After all, we bind ourselves too much with what others expect of us. Sometimes, we are the only ones sabotaging our dreams. And we will be the only one, taking the first step towards it. As Lupita Nyongo said in her Oscar Acceptance Speech –
No matter where you are from, your dreams are valid.
