reading room
Compulsory Existence
I am told this is good for me. That attendance is education, that education is liberation, that liberation is obedience to the timetable.
They call it freedom, the freedom to choose between one government-approved route and another. The freedom to wear my tie straight, to keep my hair bound in an acceptable demonstration of focus.
I sit in a room and I think: my body is here because the law says it must be, and my mind is elsewhere because my body is.
Sometimes I wonder if the real subject being taught is submission: how to smile politely while they measure your attention span in units of compliance. How to call the bars of the cage discipline. How to label your questions as distractions, and your enthusiasm as disruption.
Ah, the wondrous, infallible curriculum! That celestial scripture of state-approved curiosity. Immutable. Unquestionable. Its commandments carved into PowerPoint slides, delivered by prophets of punctuality.
I'm not asking to burn it down, only to annotate the margins. To say: this doesn't fit me. This doesn't honour the way my mind tangles and bursts and leaps like fireworks that refuse to be choreographed. I love my brain for its chaos, its insistence that beauty lives in digression.
But here, I must behave. I must stay in line. I must recite the learning objective until I no longer have objectives of my own.
Sometimes, when I'm really tired, I imagine the walls breathing— slow, bureaucratic inhales, exhales of policy. The air tastes metallic, like it's been filtered through rules. A heat builds in my chest, not anger exactly, just pressure, a quiet, constant burning behind the ribs.
And yet, they say I am lucky. They say children elsewhere would kill for this. Would kill for the right to sit quietly and copy definitions of autonomy.
What irony! That we are told to think for ourselves it environments designed to stop us doing so.
School teaches me philosophy, but forbids me from living it. We discuss free will under the shadow of compulsory attendance. We debate the social contract that none of us signed. We define utilitarianism while sacrificing our joy for the greater good of the data sheet.
When I speak with passion, they tell me to simplify. When I dig too deep, they tell me to stop. When I move too fast, they tell me to slow down. When I take my time, they tell me I'm behind. I've learned that learning, apparently, has a correct speed. That curiosity must follow the fixed schedule of comprehension. That thought must be punctual.
And when I try to hold it in, the questions twitch behind my teeth, press against the back of my throat, as if language itself is trying to escape. My lungs tighten with swallowed words.
But the worst thing— the thing that burns— is being rushed. Not the kind that comes from urgency or need, but the kind that comes from someone deciding your pace for you, When they tap their foot, raise an eyebrow, wait for your mind to collapse into something shorter. When a thought, still forming, is treated like failure. I feel it in my body: the throat constricting, pulse quickening, the raw electricity of being forced to think faster than truth allows.
I see it everywhere: online, in classrooms, in every argument that rewards speed over sincerity. If you don't have an answer now, you don't deserve the time to find one. As if reflection were cowardice. As if the space between sentences were shameful. As if silence weren't also a form of thought.
But my mind was not built for timetables. It stumbles and sprints, pauses to marvel, loops back to something half-remembered, connects two ideas no one asked it to. The fixed schedule of learning feels like being asked to dance to a metronome— every step exact, every breath corrected.
Maybe that's the lesson. Maybe the system is the syllabus. Maybe obedience is the hidden exam. Maybe the grade is survival.
I could thrive if I were allowed to be deliberate, to construct my knowledge as I build songs, poems, looping four bars of logic, then layering questions and strange harmonies until something clicks.
But here, everything must move at one tempo. No rubato. No freedom of phrasing. No pause that might lead no real thought. It won't earn a grade— that's the point.
It's no wonder I wake each morning with that low hum of despair, that dull ache of being managed, of being someone else's project. My jaw aches from restraint. There's a pulse in my temples; the second hand on a clock that never stops.
The world loves to speak of fairness, while defining it as sameness.
The world loves to chant about freedom, while handing you a pre-written timetable.
And I just want to ask— not shout, not break, just ask— is this really what they call living?
I don't hate learning. I hate being taught as a form of possession. Knowledge shouldn't be administered. It should be discovered, devoured, disassembled, and loved.
But here it's measured in marks and minutes. Every insight is a step toward a qualification, not liberation.
Still, I'm here. It's 2 a.m. on the first Monday back after half term. The house is silent, but my mind refuses to clock out. I should be sleeping, resting, preparing to obey the timetable again— but I'm writing this instead. Refusing to be cured of wonder. Hoping that somewhere, beyond this detention of daily life, a freer kind of mind is waiting.
Until then, I'll keep breathing beneath the surface, scribbling my rebellion in the margins of a worksheet that calls it off-task. And maybe, when the paper's marked, they'll see the question I left at the bottom of the page, a single smudge of graphite, shaking like a pulse.
It won't earn a grade. It isn't on the syllabus. But it's mine— the small, stubborn tremor of a body still thinking, and the faint sound of walls still breathing— as if they, too, were learning to resist.
— Lilith