The world is F*CKED

I completed my post graduation in 2021 and thought I wouldn't have to look back at academia ever again. End of last year I got diagnosed with ADHD and ASD. Although the doctor refused to treat me for it, it made sense that I am neurodivergent. I had been craving the structure of student life for the last two years so I took the leap and applied for a MBA program. It's a pretty chill degree after hardcore Physics for 5 years. I had always been told I'm smart and academically prone to excellence. I always took it with a grain of salt. I know my worth is not all hard work. A lot of it is privilege. I stand wham in the middle of the wheel of power and powerlessness after all. Mentally ill, lower middle class faggot with no generational wealth but a pretty surname, a suburban upbringing and a fluent vocabulary in Inglis. Talk about centrists, eh?

In my undergrad, I raw dogged my depression, possible neurodivergence, anxiety, OCD and whatever else doctors fancy I am afflicted with. It obviously caused my grades to fall majorly. The only time in my life when I wasn't at the top percentile. Today while finishing admission process for the MBA, I applied for a scholarship awarded based on merit and I was told I don't qualify because my bachelor's marks were low. I have a decade long academic performance data to draw from and I don't qualify because one year when I contemplated jumping off the train on my way back home from class every single day, I slacked a little, prioritised healing over hieroglyphs on a piece of paper. Because for the first time in 20 fucking years on Earth, I listened to my body and did my best and not the best I was supposed to do. I don't mind not qualifying for a scholarship. My point is that merit which seems like such a well defined term is not based on any rules. It's whatever the one determining it chooses it means. How can you quantify anything when you pick and choose your input data?

Merit is a scam, a buzzword made up to pander to the status quo. When UC people get handouts, it's called scholarships and grants. When marginalized castes, religions, genders get the same scholarships and grants, we're called beggars, exploiters cheating people off their hard earned money with “emotional blackmail”. We're called out for monetising our identities as though our identities exist only for the consumption, romanticisation and distortion by the oppressor groups.

This is a PSA. If you're a minority, you're not void of merit. You just aren't the ones we'd like to give a boost in life. You were meant to never do great things and if you somehow manage to still do something with this wilfully broken system, well the least we can do is make it horribly, cruelly, unnecessarily difficult.