Repeat Behavior

This knotted feeling in my stomach occurred the day before my speech competition. It was 2001 and I was 16, young and ready to take on pushing boundary challenges that came my way. I sat in my room and envisioned 24 hours from that time. Will I be the champion speaker of my zone I asked my intuition? A force in me returned negative. I then channeled my guts and imagined myself to be a sore loser. Again the response from my intuition was not affirmative. So if I was not a winner or loser, where was my place of standing going to be.

The next day at school before the event, I was told that I was disqualified from the competition as I had took part in it the last year. How could I have not known, I did the homework and knew this was the case. Yet I chose to pursue it. I has subconsciously went ahead with a mistake.

Forward to three years after this incident and I was faced with the release of the 'A' Levels. I posed the question against my intuition. The same results came. So with that same knotted feeling in my stomach, I received the expected bad news I had subconsciously knew. By statistical yardsticks it was not disastrous, but it was for mine. Two years of slaving my time to assignments and studying produced near results as the player in my class who went after everything sans academia and the less bright student who nearly flunked out of school the first year. I felt cheated.

Yet this is deserving. Why? Compared to the last national examination I was not enthusiastic nor too driven about this one. An anxious rush in me was there to get over being in the rival school of the one at Mount Sinai as well as my dreamed ascention into a fancy American college which I could be proud of till my later(perhaps famous) days. An idealistic bubble in my head popped with the needle of reality.