Pretending you understand by just underlining everything.
PRETENDING YOU UNDERSTAND BY JUST UNDERLINING EVERYTHING.
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We’ve all been there, perched in those hallowed library stacks, surrounded by towering texts and an unspoken expectation of genius. You're flipping through dense pages, perhaps a classic theory or complex economic model, and the words swim before your eyes. The clock ticks past midnight. Your initial, optimistic plan of creating perfectly color-coded notes has long dissolved into a frantic scramble. Instead, you grab your highlighter or pen, and without truly grasping the intricate arguments, you just start underlining. Everything. Paragraph after paragraph. A desperate, almost ritualistic act, hoping that by physically marking the text, some osmosis of knowledge will occur.
This isn't a confession; it's a shared memory. The silent nod in a seminar when the professor asks if there are any questions, even though your internal monologue is screaming for a re-explanation of the past hour’s lecture. The art of appearing perfectly engaged, even brilliant, while inside, you're piecing together fragments, feeling a gnawing imposter syndrome. We mastered the performance of intellectual comprehension long before we truly understood. It wasn't about laziness; it was about survival in an environment where the pressure to excel was relentless, where showing vulnerability felt like admitting defeat. From those initial, almost childlike attempts at organized learning to the frantic last-ditch efforts, our study habits were a unique blend of aspiration and pure, unadulterated stress. We went from meticulously planned schedules to crying quietly in a study carrel, sometimes wondering if anyone else felt just as lost.
That underlining, that universal symbol of "I'm trying, I really am," was our secret handshake.
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