Letting Go of My Ambitions.

Over the past few months, I’ve been preparing for a college entry test. Countless hours spent on studying have gone by, sleepless nights and restless days that I’ve dedicated for an ambition of mine.

Since 2018, I’ve always pictured my future self as a student at one of Indonesia’s top state universities. It was such a big ambition of mine, I thought that it was the place I belong. A place where I could be the best version of myself, somewhere I’d be happy.

Long story short, I only wanted to go there and nowhere else. Going to any uni other than that certain university will leave me unsatisfied — or so I thought.

Fast forward to 2020, the day of the test result announcement has come ... and I failed.

Hope was still inside of me, since there was one more test that I took to apply for that uni.

I failed that test, too.

To be completely honest, that failure completely broke me. I was in pieces, the reality that I had to let go of my dream university broke me. It was surreal, failure had never got to me this bad before.

I was down on myself, I was unstable, I was on the brink of insanity. I worked so hard and got nothing back. Well, I did. But it wasn’t what I wanted, and I felt failure because of that.

My world crumbled around me.

Daydreams of going to that university slowly faded away. It was devastating.

Rather than settling for something that I didn’t really want, I decided to apply to a design school. It wasn’t a state uni, so it was really weird adjusting to reality.

Seeing all my friends passing the tests that I failed was really off-putting, I felt left out.

Furthermore, the expectations that people had on me was hard to deal with. People expected me to succeed, but I didn’t.

What I learnt from this experience is that, sometimes to deal with your lost ambitions, you’ve got to dream bigger.

And so I did.

My goals are now bigger than ever. Even though it is not what I expected two years ago, but I can now say with the utmost confidence that, I am happy of what happened.

Without this happening, I will never be able to cope with failure and I will never learn that sometimes, letting go of something leads to the discovery of something bigger.