“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 stopped being just a test and became a reflection of who I was. There was a time when not knowing an answer pushed me to learn it at any cost. Later, even when I knew the answer, I chose silence because I no longer trusted myself. I began avoiding people, conversations, and gatherings, not because I didn’t belong but because I was afraid of being exposed. Slowly, I went from being the most confident voice in the room to someone who didn’t want to be seen. Pressure is often described as care, but it does not always feel that way. Sometimes it feels like trying to stand on something sharp while maintaining balance you never chose. One mistake was not allowed to be just a mistake. It turned into disappointment and comparison. Over time, I stopped studying to learn and started studying to prove myself, and that shift quietly destroyed everything that once made me strong. The idea of drop years is one of the most normalized and least understood parts of this journey. Two years of my life were reduced to something people casually call a “drop,” as if it is simply a pause. It is not a pause. It is isolation, anxiety, and watching your world shrink while others move forward. You lose touch with people, and eventually you lose touch with yourself. In the first year, I feared failure. In the second, I was living inside it. Every day began with pressure and ended with guilt, and somewhere in between, I stopped recognizing who I was. This is not just about an exam. It is about a system that glorifies a handful of rankers while ignoring the mental cost of everyone else. It normalizes years of emotional strain and never prepares students for the possibility of failure. Failure here is not treated as an outcome; it becomes an identity. No one tells you that lakhs of students are competing for a limited number of seats, that even hardworking students may not make it, or that there is a life beyond this path. Instead, you are told that clearing this exam will set your entire life, and nothing is said about what happens if you don’t. The result is an identity crisis that no one prepares you for. When someone asks me who I am today, I hesitate. It is not because I am nothing, but because everything I once was got buried under a single goal. I went from being an overachiever to feeling like a nobody. I went from having a voice to questioning whether I even deserve to speak. Watching others move ahead while feeling stuck in the same place is one of the hardest parts of this experience. This is also a message to parents. Your child is not a rank, not a backup plan, and not a projection of your expectations. When one exam becomes everything, it stops being motivation and becomes pressure that quietly breaks them. They may not always show it, but they are losing confidence, losing their voice, and sometimes losing themselves just to meet expectations they never chose. Support should not feel like control, and love should never feel conditional. There are truths we were never told. We were never told that an exam could take more than it gives, that hard work does not always guarantee success in this system, or that attaching your identity to a result is one of the fastest ways to lose yourself. We were never told that walking away from one path does not make you a failure. For anyone standing at the beginning of this journey, it is important to understand what you are stepping into. This path demands more than academic effort; it tests your confidence, your identity, and your mental strength. If you choose it, do so with awareness. Do not let a single exam define your worth or reduce your identity to a rank. Not everyone in this system is meant to win, and that is a reality that should be acknowledged, not hidden. Today, I am on a different path, one I never planned. It is not perfect, but it feels possible again. That is something I had lost for a long time. Maybe that is the truth we needed all along: an exam can decide a college, but it cannot decide a life. Baiza Mushtaq, alumna GK School of Communications