The Turbulent Life of Katsuo / 30s / The Kosen Graduate's Story #5

英語版も作成してみました！日本語版もあるので是非読みやすい方を！

👆Chapter 4 (Life at Kosen — ) - Continued...

Chapter 5 | Failure — The Reality Waiting at the End of Barely Holding On

■ Surviving Without Truly Understanding
Even without ever feeling like I truly understood what I was learning, life at Kosen kept moving forward.

My test scores stayed low. Very few results ever felt satisfying. And yet, somehow, I never completely collapsed.

The reason was simple: I had learned how to survive without fully understanding.

I started analyzing everything strategically—the weighting of exams, the value of assignments, the structure of makeup tests and remedial classes. I learned where to earn points and where to let things go. My focus shifted from understanding the material to simply advancing to the next year.

Once I changed my standards like that, I somehow managed to make it through to the third year.

Swimming continued too. It no longer felt like chasing results the way it once had, but the pool remained a place where I could breathe. If all I had done was face academics alone, maybe I would have broken much earlier.

At the very least, swimming kept me balanced.

■ Reality Arrived All at Once
That balance shattered the moment I entered my fourth year.

The difficulty of the specialized subjects was on an entirely different level. The number of classes increased all at once, and the feeling of not understanding grew heavier with every lecture. Instead of “keeping up,” it began to feel like I was simply sitting there while everything moved past me.

Some classes had average exam scores in the twenties.

And for me, getting single-digit scores stopped being unusual.

The methods I had relied on to “somehow get by” were no longer enough.

Still, I couldn’t stop.

I submitted reports, attended remedial sessions, and repeated makeup exams over and over again. At one point, I handed in a report nearly four hundred pages long. My friends and I shared old exam questions, narrowing our study focus to whatever felt remotely possible.

Even then, nothing changed.

■ The First Time I Truly Stopped
I failed.

Somewhere inside, I think I had already expected it. But hearing the word out loud carried a completely different weight.

The moment I stepped out of my homeroom teacher’s office, my father exploded at me. I don’t remember the exact words he said. But I remember the feeling that followed.

So this is it. I really couldn’t do it.

Strangely though, I didn’t completely fall apart.

Maybe it was because I wasn’t alone.

Some of my friends had failed too. Just knowing there were others still standing in that same classroom somehow eased the loneliness. Even the younger students treated us almost the same as before—careful at times, but still normal enough to make things bearable.

Still, reality didn’t change.

The thing I had somehow managed to keep holding together had finally broken apart.

And yet, at the same time, another thought quietly surfaced.

Maybe if I had kept forcing myself forward like this, things would have become even more painful.

For the first time, being forced to stop gave me space to think.

What was I supposed to do now?
What did I actually want to choose?

I still had no answers.

But one feeling remained unmistakably clear:

From this point on, I couldn’t keep living the same way I always had.