A Wish, In Three Parts — Part 2: I Wasn’t Trying to Win Anymore

If you want the story from the start, it begins here: [link to Part 1]

Something I did not choose because someone else asked me to

After the provincial round, I stopped chasing chemistry.

Not out of protest.

Out of relief.

For a while I did not know what to replace it with, only that I wanted it to be something nobody else had assigned me.

Then, almost by accident, I watched a video about an online contest offering a laptop as a prize.

I do not remember exactly why it caught my attention that particular night.

I only remember that nobody had asked me to enter it.

There was no name to protect.

No father’s reputation riding on the outcome.

Just curiosity, and a blank text editor at close to midnight, with no one there to grade it.

The first article I ever published online was, by any honest measure, bad.

I had stayed up most of the night setting up the blog, choosing a template, writing something I was sure would matter to someone.

It did not.

The competition I wrote it for did not go my way, and looking back at that early writing now, I understand exactly why.

But something about the process itself had felt different from anything I had done for the subject I used to represent.

A folder full of other people’s expertise

Before I had reliable internet access, I had a laptop with limited data and an unusual habit.

I kept a folder organized by car brand, filled with hundreds of vehicle review videos, some local, most from reviewers overseas.

I watched them without any particular goal.

I was not trying to become anything through it.

I simply liked understanding how something worked, and why one reviewer’s opinion differed from another’s.

That folder, more than any classroom, was where I first learned what it felt like to study something because I wanted to, not because I was being measured.

Ranking had been the whole test. Then it wasn’t.

For most of school, doing well had simply meant a number: where I placed among my classmates.

Around the time I finally got real, unlimited access to the internet, something about that number stopped mattering the way it used to.

I do not think it is accurate to say I got bored of it.

It is closer to say I noticed, for the first time, that the number only measured a room this size, when the room outside it was much bigger.

I did not yet know what I wanted instead.

I only knew that being near the top of a class whose edges I could already see no longer felt like enough.

The trip that put both of us on a national stage

Later, a national-level writing competition took me to the capital city, at almost the same time as a friend from the earlier story — the one who had gone on to the national olympiad after I hadn’t.

He was representing biology, not chemistry, and a different city entirely, but the timing lined up almost too neatly: the same week, the same capital, two students who had started that year at completely different distances from a stage like this.

It felt strange, arriving in the same city for a stage I once assumed I would never reach, and certainly not through a subject like this one.

I was representing something I had chosen for myself, in a category that had nothing to do with a lab coat or a periodic table.

I remember standing outside the venue, surrounded by tall buildings, watching other participants unpack equipment that looked nothing like what I owned.

I was writing with a small laptop bought years earlier for a purpose that had nothing to do with me.

Some of the other students carried equipment far beyond anything I would have thought to ask my parents for.

I did not resent them for it.

But I understood, for the first time, that effort and access were not the same thing, and that both were quietly deciding outcomes I used to think were only about how hard someone tried.

I did not place in that competition.

Throwing myself at every competition, without asking why

After that trip, I did not stop and refine my approach.

I entered nearly every blog and writing competition I could find, one after another, without pausing to ask what separated the entries that won from the ones that didn’t.

I joined a national community of bloggers.

I migrated my site to a proper platform.

I bought basic tools I barely knew how to use, and read everything I could find about how search algorithms worked.

I kept writing about the same subject that had first pulled me into that late-night folder of videos: cars, and slowly, the technology behind the sites and tools I was now using to write about them.

I lost most of those competitions.

One, I later heard, may not have been judged fairly at all.

For a while I let that explanation sit comfortably, because it was easier than the alternative.

But eventually I noticed something in my own work.

I had been imitating other writers’ styles, borrowing their layouts and their flourishes, hoping the imitation would be mistaken for skill.

So when the next contest appeared, offering another laptop as a prize, I tried something plainer instead.

Less decoration.

More substance.

I spent weeks gathering information from every review and benchmark I could find, cross-checking details until I understood the product better than a glance at a spec sheet could offer.

I sent drafts to a few bloggers I had gotten to know by then, people whose judgment I trusted more than my own at that point, and asked them to tell me honestly where it was weak.

Then I waited, the way you wait after doing something you cared about more than you wanted to admit.

A message came from a friend before any official announcement did.

Hey. You won.

I remember rereading it twice before I believed it.

The other finalists were not beginners.

Two of them were bloggers I had personally admired for years, the kind whose sites I used to study late at night trying to understand what made their writing work.

The prize was a laptop I would go on to use for the next eight years.

I remember feeling strangely quiet when I found out, not triumphant.

I was not trying to win anymore. I think that might be exactly why I did.

What actually changed

It would be convenient to say I simply improved.

But what changed first was not my ability.

It was my reason for trying.

The subject I had once been pushed to represent, I studied to survive being watched.

This, I studied because I wanted to understand it, and the writing followed from that wanting, not from the pressure of an audience.

I do not think this makes the second effort purer than the first.

I think it only means effort behaves differently depending on where it comes from.

What I still had, that others did not

I want to be honest about something else here too.

None of this happened without help I did not fully earn.

My school paid for part of that trip to the capital city.

My father’s old laptop, however worn, was still a laptop.

My mother’s scholarship, awarded years earlier while I was still in elementary school, was what had originally paid for the small laptop I was now writing on, long before either of us knew what it would end up being used for.

I was not without support.

I was only without the kind of support that made things easy.

The handover happened at a school assembly, in front of the same rows of students who had once only heard my name read out for chemistry.

I had pictured a moment like this before, vaguely, the way you picture things you don’t really expect to happen.

Standing there while the box was passed to me, I remember thinking, almost calmly: this is the version of the picture I had never quite let myself finish imagining.

I held that laptop box like it was something I had finally earned on my own terms.

For eight years, it mostly felt that way.

I did not know yet how much of what I was building with it would not be mine to keep.

Part 3: [link]