Why You Always Think "Maybe I Am The Problem"

Maybe It's Me

The accounting failure wasn't just academic.

I started turning it inward. Running the numbers on myself instead.

At some point during that period I started wondering if something had happened to me. Something I couldn't remember. Something that would explain the internal wars, the body that kept failing, the chaos that followed me from one location to the next. I started to wonder if my parents were keeping something from me. I am taller than both my parents. Maybe I was adopted?

So I asked my mother.

I asked her to go through whatever she could remember. Any incident. Any event. Anything that might explain it.

She went through what she knew. The vomit incident. Then there was the pool — I had an image of blue tiles, a mermaid painted at the bottom, white tiles around the edge at the surface. She said my cousin had grabbed me to prevent me going under. That everyone was there. That it was nothing serious.

I couldn't remember enough to push back.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I had been making things bigger than they were my whole life — the pool, the rip current in Jeffreys Bay, the accounting class, all of it. She had always said I was a fearful child. That I saw danger where there was none.

Maybe the problem wasn't the degree or the apartment or Johannesburg.

My mother had sacrificed for me. My father had signed the contract, paid the fees, believed in me enough to fund a whole year. I had been given everything I needed.

And I was failing anyway.

I couldn't go back to Johannesburg.

I couldn't stay here either.

Chapter 6: Harties & The Pivot

The Exhibition

JS took me to a photography exhibition one evening. A semi-formal show in an old house — wooden floors, high ceilings, the smell of books. White walls with black and white photographs hung against them. Someone handed me a glass of wine at the door.

I walked through the parking lot toward the entrance and O was standing there with JS.

I noticed his energy before anything else. Not his appearance. Just the way he occupied the space. He was a photographer. That meant he moved through the world looking at it differently than everyone else.

I filed that away and didn't say much.

Inside, I looked at the photographs against the white walls and felt the particular ache of standing in a world I had only been allowed to dream about from a distance. Like if I wanted it too much, something would take it away.

I had a glass of wine and felt like I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be able to access.

I liked it.

The Rooftop Call

One night, I was sitting on the roof of my friend JS's house after a barbecue. O, the photographer was also there that night.

At some point, I quietly climbed up there alone and sat, looking at the moon.

The semester was ending. The accounting exam had been too much. I couldn't continue the degree. But I also couldn't go back to Johannesburg.

From that isolated place, I called my parents. One by one. Crying. Telling them I couldn't continue.

That phone call — that raw, desperate act — finally spurred my father to devise the plan:

I would come live with him.

What this excerpt documents is not a college story. It is a particular structural position — one where, when circumstances fail, the first conclusion reached is always the same: the fault is internal.

Not the degree structure. Not the environment. Not the accounting. You.

The calculation runs inward. And whatever evidence exists — the parent who sacrificed, the opportunity you were given, the support you received — gets factored in as proof that the only variable was you. You were given everything. You failed anyway. Therefore you are the problem.

Your version of this calculation will look different. Different setting, different failure, different people whose sacrifices became the weight. But if you know what it is to have evidence of your own failure arrive before the question of the structure was ever asked — if the inward verdict comes faster than the external audit — that is not self-awareness. That is a code running.

It has a name. The X-Ray returns yours.