Anxiety to Confidence

It was a gloomy Monday morning. The sun had hardly risen above the horizon. I had been waiting outside the examination hall, the doors shut with just a keyhole reflecting light. My eye bags were swollen as I had not slept through the previous night because of the thunder rumbles. The anxiety of taking examinations offline again, after two whole years of online schooling, was a little hard to process.

While I was standing against the wall, thinking of all the possible ways of messing up the examination since I had not even read the last chapter of Jainism and Buddhism, I heard a girl speak to her friend about how she could only manage three revisions before the exams, along with the full portion tests that she had aced.

This made me feel very unprepared. All I saw was the whole examination hall filled with bodies, with books as their heads. Students had made notes with neat and colorful ink, and even the people who seemed not to care about school were all peering into dozens of books spread across their tables. I was traumatized upon seeing this and rummaged through my bag. This is when the examiner called out to keep our bags away. I started to panic and ponder how I had spent the whole day watching a Bollywood movie with my father. As soon as we received our question papers, my heart was in my mouth.

After reading it in detail, I realized that all of this had been taught to us in an easy manner by our history teacher using acronyms, phrases, and fun ways. I recalled all the things I had learned in school and smiled through the examination. Surprisingly, the Bollywood movie I had watched also helped me answer a few multiple-choice questions. I was happy and content with my answers, and my anxiety disappeared. Walking out of the examination hall, my friends discussed the answers they had written and compared them with the textbook. Finding out that I had done extremely well in the exam, I had once again gained confidence in myself.