I think it might finally be over . <| sep |> I was from a pretty good secondary school , and I remember there was a conversation I once had with friends over lunch . It was the middle of exam season but we still had projects and homework and cca were really feeling down and started talking about how we all sometimes wanted it to go away , for good , wondered about how it ' d be like to die so it ' d be peaceful . Out of the 5 people at the table , 4 said they ' d thought seriously about killing themselves but had never done anything to carry it out . We were all straight A students and outwardly model kids with no problems to speak of . I don ' t know about their families , but mine had never put any pressure on me . The last person at the table was shocked and said it wasn ' t normal to think about killing ourselves and we needed help . We laughed it off . We thought she was the weird one and everyone felt like us . I ' ve always figured everyone dealt with it and I just needed to toughen up and stop fantasising an end and focus on my work . Its only years later in university and constantly feeling like I can ' t breathe that I realise its only gotten worse . University . is ten times what I ' ve ever experienced in PSLE or secondary school or JC . The rat race gets tighter . 9 . 510 is a 25 th percentile . There are no second chances every error is so punishing to your grade point . People can say grades don ' t matter but think about it this way you ' ve worked your whole life , with the promise that trying hard was your identity , what youre good at and you ' re just gonna throw it away after coming this far . Of course the grade matters to you . And then once you don ' t cant care about the grade anymore what do you care about then ? What ' s the point of the whole grind ? Is there even a meaning in anything you do , and if not , why even bother putting yourself through this hellhole anymore ? Why didn ' t you stop trying years ago , and find something else ? This isn ' t how education should be . Maybe I ' m idealistic , but there has to be something more than this endless stream of hopelessness with no light at the end of the tunnel . And even if , its really that all these people who go through this with me are weak and strawberries , the very least we can do is stop brushing off these people as problems that will fix themselves . I only recently realise the 5 th person at the table all those years ago was right . It isn ' t normal . And we need to first acknowledge that it isn ' t . For all the friends I ' ve met who seemed perfect from the outside but are dying inside I ' m sure some youths like us , at a table one day , would decide to act on those thoughts . It ' s scary .