I remember my school days with a mix of bitter, surprised and frantic feelings. Just to put things into perspective, I didn't go and collect my high school diploma until four years after my graduation.
I started high school at the age of fourteen and finished at the age of twenty. High school in Italy lasts five years, but it took me six years to complete it.
I started out well, then in my second year I started spiralling. Italy is not a country where teachers see a scar on your face and come to ask you what had happened. Our school was all about science and grades. How much you were worth was determined by how well you did at school. And being the only black student, the different one, in the entire building didn't help matters. There was a subtle racism. I believe that many of them did not expect me to make it, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of them also thought I didn't belong there either. After all, one of my ex classmates would call me a "dirty nigger" during an argument on Facebook.
I remember my Art teacher. I panicked and flunked my first test with her and I never made it pass a C grade, no matter how good my paper was.
However, the worst memory has to be my Physics teacher: an exceptional teacher, on whose humanity I won't spare a thought.
During my first two years, I was among those students that lingered in the middle. From time to time, I would even make it to the top. Then I started sliding, and in my fourth year, I hit rock bottom. I had to repeat class.
Even though I cried when the letter arrived home and my father was utterly disappointed, I saw it as an opportunity to start all over again. I was more than happy to run away from those teachers who had stopped believing in me.
I didn't miss my old classmates either. As a matter of fact, none of them is my friend on social media. I resented them for not seeing through my pain and reaching out to me. I only speak to one as of today: the boy I found myself crushing on for two years in high school.
I began my first four years in section A and ended my last two years in section C: same course, but different teachers, at least in the majority of the subjects. A great relief that those Art and Physics teachers were gone for good.
I still didn't rise up to be among the top students in my class, but I was back to lingering in the middle, while occasionally reaching for the top.
My final grades were poor. I was more eager to leave that school, than to come out with flying colours.
When I applied to study Psychology at the university of Parma, I had to sit for an entrance exam. Our grades were to be calculated based on our score at the exam and on our pass mark from high school. I sat for the exam with light-heartedness.
We were over seven hundred students competing for three hundred seats. I made position two hundred and something-something.
That's when I realised that, even though I was just a 66/100 high school graduate, I knew all I needed to get through life.
All I had to do was commit.
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