slow days

Sometimes I focus only on how my hair sits on my shoulders and not on how I can barely pass my math class. Sometimes I seem to doze off into a world stitched together from dreams while my teacher repeats herself for the third time. Sometimes I turn the volume of my music a little higher, letting it wash over me, just to daydream and not complete my chores.

And yet, there are days when my posture is straight, and all my assignments are through. Days when I don’t smile all the time so I don’t look mean. Days when I am so focused that a friend’s remark on my nails doesn’t bother me. Those days, unfortunately, aren’t happening that often.

It’s as if I have burnt myself out by not bothering to do something. As if being myself is just as exhausting as not being myself. There is always the rush—the rush to be first, the rush to push through as many people as fast as you can. Even walking down the school corridor feels like a sprint; a silent race where everyone is simultaneously ignoring each other yet competing against invisible timers. And yet, being slow and enjoying my life is something I cannot risk. To slow down would feel like stepping out of the tide that has pulled me forward since I was taught to move quickly, to keep pace, to always arrive first.

How can people just assume I am carefree or stressed out? I am on the verge of an existential crisis because whether the advice to come first comes from society or the counsel to take things slowly comes from a loved one, they all grow from the same soil we walk on and stretch beneath the same sky that covers our heads. We all are not so different from one another, yet somehow we remain skies apart in our lives’ progress. Everyone has an invisible map etched into them—an expectation of where they should be by now, how fast they should have run, who they should have become. And I find myself running on a treadmill designed by invisible hands, following a route that isn’t even mine.

I want to be her. I want to be his. I want to be with them and so on. These are the demands that our minds seek and our souls crave because it has been programmed to. It is the rhythm of growing up, a pattern engraved into us before we even understand desire. Are we really to blame anyone when everyone has had expectations so high in their lives from childhood? When the soil you are planted in insists that flowers must bloom on a timetable, how can you refuse the water and sunlight it offers, even if they come laced with pressure?

I would write something just as romantic, be kind, and take life slow. But honestly? Sometimes it feels selfish, sometimes necessary. Be caring, and don’t give a care in the world. There is something crude in trying to keep up with so many people and their demands, so exhausting that I would rather set my own personal and unachievable goal just to spite myself. It is funny, really, how we take things so differently. There is irony in the fact that I will always be slow on my fast-paced days and rushing on slow days. And yet, what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll repeat the same mistakes until I have memorized the steps with my eyes closed, like that Pythagoras theorem, and maybe in that repetition, I will finally recognize the pattern of my own existence.

Sometimes, I wonder if this is what adulthood feels like already: a constant weighing of moments, an endless negotiation between the self that wants to breathe and the self that wants to outrun everything. I am learning that the slow days and the fast days are not opposites but mirrors. On slow days, I notice the sunlight in the classroom slipping across the linoleum floor, the sound of a pencil scratching on paper, the faint smell of wet pavement drifting in through the window. On fast days, I barely breathe, barely register, barely notice that my shoes are scuffed, that my hands are trembling from running between classes. Both are real. Both are me. Both are exhausting.

I have noticed, too, how other people’s rhythms collide with mine. There is the girl who laughs so loudly, it is as if she owns the air. The boy who taps his pen on the table with machine-like precision. They do not slow down for anyone, nor do they accelerate to match anyone else. And here I am, trying to find balance somewhere in between—sometimes mimicking them, sometimes resisting. Sometimes I feel like an invisible observer of all this motion, my own feet half in the river, half on the bank.

And yet, amidst the chaos, I find moments of quiet rebellion. Like taking a single sip of coffee slowly when everyone else is gulping it down in five seconds flat. Or pausing mid-step to watch a leaf fall from the tree outside the window. Or humming a song I made up only in my head while pretending to copy notes in class. These small acts are mine alone. They are proof that I exist on my terms, even if the rest of the world does not notice.

I am learning to forgive myself for my slowness. Not the slowness that society mocks, the slowness that makes people sigh at my inability to rush, but the slowness that allows me to live fully inside moments. To notice, to feel, to fail, to recover, to try again. Because speed is not always a measure of worth. Sometimes the richest learning comes from the pauses, the hesitations, the seconds spent just staring at how your hair rests on your shoulders or listening to the faint hum of the classroom heater

And yet, I still chase. I still rush when I should be still. I still slow when I should be moving. It is a dance I cannot escape. But there is humor in it. There is grace in it. And there is a strange kind of joy in realizing that even if I never “get it right,” I am alive, remembering, learning, trying, and maybe that is enough.

Because in the end, the slow days and the fast days are not enemies. They are the same river seen from opposite banks. Sometimes you must run to avoid drowning, and sometimes you must sit in the water to know its depth. I am learning, still, to live in both, to respect both, and to find the balance that feels like me.

And perhaps, one day, I will memorize the steps with my eyes closed, not just like Pythagoras’ theorem, but like the pattern of my own life—messy, contradictory, beautiful, slow and fast all at once.

Until then, I will keep my music a little louder, my hair falling just as it pleases, and my heart stubbornly aware that the pace of my days belongs to me alone.

Thank you :)