“This System Broke Me”: The Truth About Life Beyond NEET & JEE

There was a time when I knew exactly who I was. I was the girl who stood on stage without fear, the one who debated, anchored, and spoke with clarity and confidence. If I didn’t know something, I chased it. I went home, opened books, searched endlessly, and sacrificed sleep just so I could come back the next day and answer with certainty. I wasn’t just a good student. I was alive in my learning. Then came NEET, not as a choice but as a direction decided for me. It was called a natural step, a future already seen in me. Somewhere along the way, I started believing it too. The white coat, the stethoscope, the “Dr.” before my name—it all became so real that I stopped questioning whether the path was truly mine. What we rarely question is the system itself. We don’t just prepare for these exams; we glorify them. Coaching institutes turn them into industries, society turns them into status, and families turn them into identity. Students slowly become numbers within that system. It is presented as the ultimate gateway to success, but no one talks about what it does to the thousands who don’t make it. The truth is that this system doesn’t just test students; it consumes them from the inside out. At the beginning, I did everything right. I studied day and night, followed every instruction, revised, repeated, and sacrificed. Still, it was not enough. My performance was not terrible, but it was never enough to reach where I was expected to be. In this system, being good is invisible, and over time, “not enough” starts to feel like “not worthy.” The breaking point did not come from one major failure. It came from repeated moments of self-doubt, comparisons, and reactions. One bad performance...