The Cookie Road

Sidewalk billboards, racers and the Forbidden Forest.

The Cookie is a glitch.

I forgot when I first used this metaphor, but it was related to the educational system in a rant to a friend of mine. I’ve imagined this schooling system like a race on a road that cuts through a thick forest. The trees engulfed the road as the race progressed, making it seem that nobody moved an inch. At the end of it sat this magical, almost unattainable cookie. On that night I managed to paint the image of one of my toughest times in my young adult life. In the hopes that this will also help you put some handles onto those feelings, let’s dive in.

There is no secret that I strongly disliked the schooling system, but everything culminated at the end of my University years. That was the point that all of us were chasing for 15, at times 16 or 18 years of climbing through the school stages. In my head, I said, breathing heavy with excitement, “this is it”. I stretched my arm, grabbed the cookie and took a bite form it. You see, the thing with the cookie is that it tastes good for about… the lifespan of a fruit-fly. Then, all that remains is the aftertaste. My head was spinning. I was so disoriented, so disappointed and slowly I fell into one of my darkest times. The mirage shattered and I with it.

I made my grand entrance in the educational system in a rather gloomy autumn season, in ’99, in an Eastern European school. Now, this part is very important, as it places everything into context. We were eleven years away from the fall of the Communist system and in appearance Romania was starting to loosen up, but the minds of the people were strongly immersed in the inherited complexes, fears and limiting beliefs. In the first day of school we were given the Letter Book, but in reality, with it we also inherited the collected knowledge of what school is, what are the primordial qualities to succeed, what rules you need to obey and most importantly — what you get out of it.

I admit that starting even from my last year in kindergarten, just thinking about school gave me a feeling of claustrophobia. The notion of a constant race, of a constant grading system of measuring my worth — it really scared me. What if I fell behind? What If I tripped and the forest engulfed me with not a single chance of being one of “them” ever again. The embryo of the primordial fear of am-I-good-enough started to form. But I was told that I need to move forward, so that’s the direction I took. Everyone raced constantly, at times in simultaneous fields, to get to the promised land — to that cookie. If you follow this road and this road alone, you’ll get to that cookie. This was the first sign you saw at the roundabout, just before exiting kindergarten and going into first grade.

And we all believed it! We bought into it. We cried over grades, we also celebrated them, our entire world revolved around this game. We were reminded constantly “if you wanna achieve something in life, you just gotta study hard”, “you just have to study, and you’ll have everything you ever wanted”. I remember my Grandma saying “if you don’t study, you’ll end up sweeping the streets”. I call these statements, “billboards”. They were mounted on both sides of The Road constantly reminding us what we have to gain, just like in an overly saturated add. The billboards also reminded us what we have to lose: “do you really want to be a disappointment?”, “that’s it?”, “is it really enough?”. These billboards were smart, you see, because they played on each viewer’s vulnerability strings. At the sight of them, they made you run faster, play harder.

So, we sculpted accordingly those credulous children we were, while we kept developing in this game. Along the way, I saw peers make strides on that road. Absolutely dominating it! There were also those in the middle, who seemingly didn’t have a care in the world and then, lastly, there was the lone pack. Usually, comprised from the people sitting in the back of the classroom. I was one of them. We were the ones that fought the hardest with the system and we were also closest to the forest.

Communism is a time capsule. Much like Voldemort’s Horocrucxes, it endured through the system long after it ceased to exist in it’s fullest form. During the regime, anything out of the status quo was punished, there were strict ways of addressing authority figures, uniforms, the rules were boldly laid out and your rights were in the interest of the system. Our parents saw that the only way to climb this stiff ladder was through education. The mass population was kept on a short leash, while the elites were enjoying the sparkling side of a sacrificed country. The unspoken motto of the leadership at the time whispered something along the lines of: if you play by the rules we won’t knock you down and (just) mayyybe we’ll let you climb one step higher. The consequences of being on a lower stair case were real and so was the pain. So, by staying in line and meeting all expectations, was the best strategy to win at this game.

Keep a man long enough in chains and he’ll start to love them.

But the full impact of those times can be felt in the mindset of Romanians, years later. It seeped into the brain’s creases and rooted there to shape the reality that, as I said, everyone believed. And nowhere do those limiting beliefs act more than in the relationship between parent and child, because many make the mistake of thinking of the child as an extension of themselves. You’d do anything to save yourself (version 2.0) from harm, right? Right. So when we got home, those billboards were reflected back at us, but in a more personal manner. They stung differently. In this combination, the doom of the forest promised to hurt like shame. To see a peer turn it’s back on the road, lifting the middle finger and going straight into the Forbidden Forrest to evolve according to her or his rules, was truly a heroic act. In all of my school years, I didn’t see such a maverick in action. As a grown-up now, I look up to these rebels. I found them all living in western countries; they might exist in my country, but the spotlight isn’t on them. This speaks volumes.

This toxic cocktail was served with a side dish of traits that were automatically placed on a pedestal, strong inequalities in the quality of education between schools and cities, along with our ability to remember data and deliver it as close to it’s initial form. Creativity, initiative, curiosity, diversity was shoved to a corner. Or to the back of the classroom.

If you gave up, you were doomed, so the only way out was through.

What if in every direction you turn the one-size-fits-all option is the only one on the table?

Even though there were ranks within the road, ironically, close to everyone survived The Road with different scars to show for it.

If you were to cut the road at any given point you wouldn’t even know that a piece is missing. Every group had their personal forest creeping up on them, as no one was comparing to the lower pack, only to the top, chasing the backs of the people in front of them. What they didn’t know is that beyond that imagined forest, the road still went on and at the end of it the forest line was even more threatening. The last pack, myself included, repeated the same mistake. Maybe the road actually went on before our imagined forest. I wonder how it was for the pack that wasn’t even on my map? Did they still run? Did they watch our backs moving further from them like we saw the others? Did they envy our spot on the road? Did they give up? Was there an even larger failure than what our forest promised? My answer is yes, given my perspective now, but I cannot fully place myself in their shoes, nor in those that ran faster than mine. Tough, I can imagine. We walked the same road, but according to different reference points.

Sometimes the messages were ironic, taunting us to give up.

Then, there we were, at last, we raced the final stretch and we made it. Bruised, scarred, happy and all, it didn’t matter because we were there. Surely, because we’ve worked so hard the cookie must be worth it. Almost all of my peers that started the journey in ’99 stopped running around the same time. We all looked around. I was shocked to find that the faces belonging to the ever moving backs were just as puzzled, just as sad. The system failed us. We failed us! It promised us everything, but the magic cookie echoed of emptiness leaving us even without the authoritarian direction some despised.

I think our educational systems really prop up that feeling and that sens of accomplishment (…) You get given this certificate of “well done, now you know everything, you’ve ticked all the boxes, you’ve gone and done everything we’ve asked you to do”. (…) That actually sets people up for a devastating comedown… — Emma Watson in this brilliant interview with Reni Eddo-Lodge

I, again, made another grand entrance, but this time it was in my quarter-life crisis. And I wasn’t even a quarter of a 100 yrs life span at that time!

So what’s the curve-ball the system threw at us? The biggest error that we’ve learned is to place our value systems outside ourselves. To measure ourselves against the overbearing “perfect” and furthermore discard any effort made if we failed to reach the ideal. It made us doubt our instincts and look up and around for approval. It also created this ranking in our minds, making it all right to bottle up the complexity of our human self into grades and judge ourselves by them. It made us exercise predominately one set of traits, while sporadically others. Academically, like Emma said, it also gave us the ultimate sense of accomplishment and promise that once you passed the line, we would have all the elements to start a job and building on that dream. Because we were in a system where any anomalies were marginalized and leaving the largest part, fitting a pre-set norm. We were practicing in lab conditions without even knowing it. The road distorted those that from the beginning struggled to fit the one size. They cut and bent whatever they could to fit the one acceptable pair of jeans; no matter what, they were always the odd man out. But we weren’t the system’s first victims. It failed others before us, leaving them behind in 8th grade, 10th grade or at the end of high school. Few ran for the sake of passion, most for fear of failure.

Breaking out of the Lab

How can we escape it? Be wary of runabouts with only one exit as an option.

The only way is not forward, but onward — to the right, left, zig-zag, U-turn and/or in alternate Universes. But how you choose to create those paths… it’s on you!

Life is not as finely delimited as we’d like it to be, it’s a paradoxical jungle, filled with contrasts. The landscape is ever-changing. It’s good to develop a system but never follow it blindly. Our primordial need to categorize and label sprouts from our fear of instability, which is strongly challenged by the one constant in life — change. We need to find that solid ground within us.

There is no title in the world that gives anyone the power to decide over the intrinsic value of you. Not a teacher, not a boss, not your best friend, or the “squad”. Not an intergalactic overlord. Not even your parents. No one. That power is autonomous and it belongs to us, only.

Before ending, I want to clarify that it wasn’t all gloomy and sad. I’ve have had so many laughs with my peers, we’ve tied friendships that defy the edges of time, we went on adventures and graffitied together over those billboards. Sometimes, we even did the things that expelled us into the Forbidden Forrest. I’ve learned camaraderie and what it means to work hard. But to sweep under the rug part of the story, would be unfair and a complete mistake as this practice keeps alive that absurd wish to live in lab conditions. I cherish and thank both the dark and the light.

I just think that if we spend so much time talking about bullying we should spend an equal amount of time on talking about the system that enables it all.

So — onwards may we go like the mavericks that we are.

Thank you for checking out this story! This is the recommendations section. Welcome.

If you don’t identify with a single word said above, well, then thanks for hanging out. I hope you enjoyed it. Get yourself a margarita and then go hug your parents for raising a such a powerhouse!

Now for the recommendation section I actually have in mind a book that compliments perfectly this post. It’s called The Third Door by Alex Banyayan. Check it out and you’ll understand why. Shutout to Tom Bilyeu where I’ve heard of Alex’s work first. Here’s the interview.

What was your experience with the educational system? No — really, I really want to hear your thoughts on this? Was it just me?