Red
Red. Red is blood, Red is fire, Red is my favorite color. Red has been in every school logo I’ve been too, and Red fills half of my country’s flag. Red is the Pokemon Gameboy Color Cartridge that started all of this.
I was gifted Pokemon Red by my uncle at an age far too young to even read the instruction manual or the words on the screen. All I could do was mash the buttons and that’s why I have a theory that I dislike the color Blue because I kept getting beaten by Trainer Blue/Gary after you choose your starter Pokemon at Professor Oak’s lab.
Stuck at the tutorial, I remember giving up on the game until there was a day when it all clicked. It was a day where I woke up early, switched on the game, chose my Charmander because I liked Dinosaurs, and beat Blue/Gary, only to get stuck at Brock because fire is bad against rock, but hey, I got past the first roadblock, I had solved the first problem…only to run into more.
Pokemon is an engine of failure for someone who has no idea of how to play the game, but it is lenient. Pokemon doesn’t erase your fainted partners and it doesn’t restart your game from the beginning. It lets you keep pummeling at the point of failure until you overcome it. Pokemon lets you fail, unlike the tests and exams that came during the start of my education.
I’d like to believe there is a kid out there who goes to their first exam knowing the full impact of their grades and how their academic scores would affect the first quarter of their lives, and that kid goes “yea, let’s succeed at life, there’s only one chance at this” because that wasn’t me. I thought school was fun because I got to learn new concepts and meet new friends every day. School was all games until the day the tests came back with more crosses, lower numbers and all the other letters except the first.
Education is a game, and it is the worst game you could play as a kid because you go in blind. It is a game that accepts no failures, well at least not for the education I was given. Matriculated right from the start, no one tells you every test is a marker of your worth and that every final exam gives you a different rank from year to year. Games make you feel all sorts of emotions while you play them, and this game of education made me feel bitter, it made me fear failure, and it made me hate inadequacy — myself.
They used to put in questions from higher years in the tests, and I remember learning long division from a classmate who at Primary One (1st Grade) was heavily attending external tuition classes, so much so that he could teach the rest of the class long division far earlier than the teacher would. I was losing at the game and I didn’t know it.
Visual Art was my saving grace, it was my redemption but it was never taken seriously as an actual class with academic consequences until high school (and even then, it was viewed as a “lesser class”). It was the one class I could do anything in, it was the one subject, the one medium that allowed my childlike imagination to reign supreme.
Yet, Art is not without rules and there is an order to the madness of putting paint on a canvas. I wouldn’t really understand that until I too, failed at Visual Art, the one thing I prided myself on. I lacked polish and poise, my art was too raw, too unrefined. Perfection and polish became a subconscious trait and I would only realize it in my final Junior College Year (Pre-Uni), when my art teacher (bless her for putting up with me) told me to stop obsessing over my artworks and to just move on the next one.
I didn’t listen because I was scared of failure but what I didn’t realize back then was that you had to get through all the bad art to get to the good ones. In the end, my final art exhibition felt lifeless to me, sure it chronicled a journey of some sort, but I was never satisfied with it at all, and I could tell the examiner wasn’t particularly pleased too. You were meant to find a personal style during the course of the IB art process, to investigate and experiment, to fail over and over in the pursuit of achieving that artistic dream, and I had missed all of that.
The only thing that saved me was two tattered sketchbooks that I kept secret, that I never included in the official exam documents because they were my failures, because they were art that I hated, they were the anathema to my success. I had always thought exams were about that A* perfection but here, for the first time, my imperfection was what counted.
That was the first time I realized that you could fail upwards — that failures didn’t always have to compound as negatives but could be positives. Failure became less of a stigma and it became an inspiration. Failure became Red, and red is the blood that spills when I get hurt. Red is the fire that burns and yet saves. Red is the learning journey my schools provided, and Red is the miracle of the hard work my country’s men and women put in as they forged an independent nation.
My greatest inspiration is the fact that we were born against all odds on an island that in all accounts could not have become its own country if we didn’t believe we could make it even if we failed.
Fail upwards.
Fail until you make it because nothing is worse than giving up on your dream.
And keep playing games, because games can teach you more about your own life than you think.
