There is a certain ache you learn to live with when you grow up in a third-world country, especially after attining adulthood, an ache that settles quietly in your chest, reminding you every day that dreaming is free, but chasing those dreams and the reality of those dreams often feels like a luxury your society cannot afford. You grow up imagining a life painted in bright colors, a life full of opportunity, innovation, and possibility, yet you often feel trapped in a grayscale. You watch your country’s potential dimmed by power outages, failed leadership, corruption, broken systems, and a rhythm of daily struggle that tries to convince you to accept less than what you’re capable of, but still, you dream, because dreaming is one of the few things the system cannot curtail. As a child, you begin to understand the seriousness of life long before you should. While children in more stable societies worry about school projects and weekend plans, you learn early that survival, and compromise are part of your vocabulary. You see adults you admire carrying multiple jobs just to make ends meet. You witness the slow erosion of people’s ambition as they adjust their dreams downward to fit the reality around them. Reality of just surviving their responsibilities. You learn that hope comes with caution and that even joy must be measured, carrying on it back the potential of disappointment, for youll come to learn that youre more likely to fail than succed, how you take the failure now is up to you.
One of the heaviest parts of growing up in a third-world country is the burden of potential without platforms. Talent is everywhere, you meet brilliant minds, creative thinkers, problem-solvers but the opportunities are scarce. You watch first-class graduates driving taxis, engineers working in banks. You realize that genius is not enough here, effort alone is not enough either. The system is always slow to reward talent, but quick to exhaust it. Over time, you begin to understand how much success here depends on factors far beyond merit. You can work the hardest, study the longest, yet still find yourself locked out because you lack the right connection, the right family name, or access to the right circles. You learn that hard work is necessary, but not always rewarded. You learn that honesty does not always produce fairness. Eventually, you begin to see that here, success for the average youth is more a game of luck. Yet, despite the harshness of it all, people still dare to dream. That is the part of the story that is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Even when everything around you seems to discourage ambition, something in you still insists on imagining a better life. You grow up and watch friends leave the country in search of a better life while you remain, uncertain. Seeing your parents sacrifice everything to keep the family afloat. Feeling guilt for wanting more, for dreaming bigger, for imagining a future that takes you far away from the land that raised you. You learn that in a different place, under different conditions, you might have already become something more. Still, life goes on. You keep pushing, hoping and clinging to faith, weaponized is the mediocrity of the system that you turn solely to religious faith, which often disappoints because you fail to realise that man made problems require man made solutions You learn to celebrate small wins because the big ones feel too far away.
