The Trap of Excellency

Mikaela Yeap
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read
Baim Hanif/Unsplash

I used to be the sort of person who just didn’t get B’s.

I was that annoying suck-up kid in middle school who raised their hand for questions so often the teacher had to start ignoring them. The sort of kid who only looked at report cards for the compliments. Studying didn’t occur to me until about high school. A’s were so regular they meant nothing.

Then ninth grade rolled around, and I realized with some discomfort that I actually had to start trying. Like most things I do, I took it too far. I got maybe five hours of sleep on average per night in the three weeks leading up to finals. I was so exhausted that I slept for twelve hours straight on weekends. My mental and emotional state suffered—but hey, it was okay. At least I was getting A’s, right? And the 97% on the Modern World History paper was worth the tens of hours total I’d spent studying for it?

Yeah. No. Even I wasn’t that blind. I devolved into my laziest state over summer and resolved that I would never reach that state of madness again.

Sophomore year, and things were looking peachy. AP World History wasn’t that hard—40 pages of reading per week, but at least I wasn’t making myself take notes. All the course material made sense. Even my friends seemed to be in a better mental state than last year.

That lasted about five minutes until a series of tests on material I thought I knew delivered a volley of brutal blows to my GPA. It fell from a 4.5 to a 4.1 in three days. For someone who had only ever experienced a drop of two levels and usually considered that cause for crisis, this was such an unprecedented incident that it was only vaguely surprising and possibly amusing. It made me think a little bit about what I’m really working for, and at what point the gap between effort and fulfillment widens so far that I should just give up.


Something you should know about me is that I am not at all a patient person. I would love to be rid of at least 99% of my commitments. I brush my teeth out of habit. I attend school because I’ve always done it. I dislike the action of going to sleep, because it’s a waste of time mandated by biology. The only thing I don’t chafe against investing time in is my relationships, and that’s only born out of my unquenchable thirst for attention and affirmation.

So the way I trick my psychology into actually sticking to things is by setting precedents. I’m the most dogged perfectionist there is. If I start something, I may well never do it again, but I can’t leave it alone until I finish it. I started freshman year studying everything there was to study and ended it that way as well. My mind works within time brackets; it’s free from that one. So now the question is: what precedent will I follow for the rest of sophomore year?


Last night, my brother video called me. He told me he wanted to spend over a thousand dollars on an iPad and Apple Pencil—an iPad and Apple Pencil for me. My immediate reaction was alarm. Under questioning, his only reasoning was “I know you like to draw”. But he was adamant about it. He really did want to spend an inordinate amount of money on technology I would probably spoil and almost certainly waste.

I barely draw. I had visions, once, of starting a YouTube channel with hand-drawn animation, but I quickly grew bored with it and dropped it. And here was one of the most frugal people I knew, second only to our father, telling me he wanted to buy me technology so I could practice a hobby I’d give up in a month.

He didn’t need much prompting to launch into a grand speech of the deeper reason behind his sudden generosity: he was worried I’d get too caught up in school and lose track of my life. He wanted the iPad and Pencil to serve as reminders to me to do something that wasn’t school, something solely for enjoyment. And while I appreciated the sentiment, I knew myself well enough to know that soon this would stop being wonderful and become just another obligation. Another wasted chance.

But he had a point. I needed something to break me out of my habits. I just wished he’d had an idea with a smaller price tag attached to it. Maybe in the comfortable range of just one zero.

I won’t complain about it if he really does get it for me. I just wonder now if a tablet and an expectant brother halfway across the world will really do the trick and trigger my metamorphosis into a meaningful, functional person.


Anything which requires effort to maintain is an obligation. Excellency, beyond a certain point, takes up all of my time and energy, and so it is an obligation. If any part of this has gotten through to you, then you know that I view all O-words as traps.

School isn’t everything. I made it my everything because it used to be easy. Now it doesn’t give returns, and I have to find something else.

Maybe it’ll take an expensive iPad and Pencil. Maybe it’ll take years and years of struggling before some epiphany is obtained, some measures are taken. Or maybe I’ll just learn to live with reasonable contentment as a decidedly un-excellent and subpar person, waiting for the Big Change that never happens.

There comes a point with everything when you have to question why. It’s why so many people want to know their purpose in life. Being alive is the one obligation we can’t wriggle out of. If we’re still in a position to question, then we’ve been stuck with it for a good long time.

I can’t answer why I should prioritize excellency in school. So I’ll do the next best thing, probably, and eradicate the need for an answer at all. As for whether I succeed, no one knows if you’ll ever find out. Medium is just another obligation, and you may never hear from me again.

Mikaela Yeap

Written by

Thinker of thoughts and maker of mistakes.

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