As a kid, I’d return some evening from school with a big sulk.

Mom would look out of the kitchen and ask why I look like someone who bit into a spicy chili. “Mohan had scored more than me in class test,” would be my usual response. From grades one to five, it was my classmate Mohan who did well in most subjects, especially in math and science in which I usually scored in the mid-fifties.

From a very young age, I wanted to do well in studies. I’d spend more time learning the number system, fractions, and decimals, finding greatest common denominator and least common multiple etc. I’d usually remember the verses taken from Shakespeare or Robert Frost. I can even remember the planetary system taught by an especially severe-looking science teacher at school, but math was quite a different thing. I’d wake up in the middle of the night wondering if I’d ever figure the steps to a math problem without squeezing my brain hard.

I remember the one occasion I felt good carrying the mark card home, since that was the only occasion when I had scored above Mohan though it was still not the first mark. “You’re looking smug today. Is that because of your marks,” mom asked, handing me a steel glassful of steaming coffee. The “yes” from me had more energy than necessary. Success that day tasted better than the cream settled on top of the brown coffee with sugar.

As I turned a teenager and became blind due to Retinitis Pigmentosa (R.P.), I still felt the hunger to do well. The hunger was so intense that I grew deaf to anyone who discouraged me from my goals. I went to college, searched hard for a career path, and felt a deep sense of disappointment and pain to hear that all my choices, right from accounting to journalism was “unsuitable for the blind.”

“The only choice for those like you,” said a close friend of my family with a finger pointed at me, “is to sign up for a government job where they’ll ask you to sit safely in a corner and direct telephone calls to higher officials.”

No offence to telephone operators, but that didn’t sound like a career to me. The suggestion almost broke my heart because someone’s assessment of me on account of my disability is that I was incapable of doing smarter things like journalism.

The more I thought of it, the greater was my resolve to follow my heart and pursue a career that stirred my passion. And I thank the universe which in its immense wisdom put me in the career path that I enjoy the most.

I grew accustomed with my blindness and understood its challenges. I also realized that I can’t compete with others, especially when no one regarded me as a competitor in their field of work on account of my blindness.

That was when I read the article of a famous sportswriter in which he said greatest champions never compete with others but achieved the goals they set for themselves. They possessed the discipline necessary to chase their dreams and live them.

So, it occurred to me that there’s an advantage in not competing with others. If people saw my blindness and concluded that I’m not their equal and therefore I can’t compete with them, they’re actually doing me a favour: they’re leaving me alone to compete with myself and strive to become my best self.

So, I succeed in being my best. My circumstances are so different that I need not compare myself with someone else, even in the same field of work as I am and feel inferior.

That’s how my disability has helped me break free from the success-failure binary and keep moving forward to achieve the best I can.

What do you do? Do you think you should compete with others or with yourself? Does success matter a lot to you?

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