School had started, and I was about to begin high school. Within at most a month, I would definitely return home. Before school started, I told my family dozens of times that I would drop out, but they still didn’t understand how determined I was, and like everyone else, they thought I would eventually fail and betray my own spirit. On the first day of school, a thought suddenly came to my mind: what was the real difference between the best school and the worst school?

My plan was to stay for a while in the school I was currently in, analyze the people, see what kind of individuals they were, then go to the school everyone called the worst and analyze the people there as well to find the real difference. In the end, I would drop out completely and return home. It was my first day in the top high school, and there were about 120 new students, divided into around 5–6 classes. In the first lesson, our homeroom teacher showed us around the school. At one point, the teacher gathered everyone and told us to throw a ball made of paper into the air, pass it to each other, and say our names while doing it. In that moment, I felt like a child who had just come to kindergarten.

On the second day, I started making phone calls with my family about returning home. The people at home thought I was being bullied or something like that, and that was why I wanted to leave, but actually, I had already told them everything beforehand. On the third day, my brother came to the school and talked with the principal to be more certain about the reason behind my desire to leave. My brother thought I wanted to leave because of the job I wanted to do in the future, but I had already explained everything many times. Despite everything, I continued analyzing the people there. Sometimes I talked to certain individuals and asked myself, “With what kind of mindset does this person live?”

Finally, one week had passed, and it was time to leave. What I saw in that school was that people had drifted far away from thinking deeply. They accepted everything without question and believed that the decisions made for them were always the best ones. I clearly remember the school principal watching me from the window while I was leaving. I had taken all my belongings, and without looking back, I set out toward the other school.

In the second week, I started at the school known as the worst one. My presence there caused a debate among the teachers, and they even held a meeting about it. I took my place and began my first day. My family knew about this and reacted a lot. There were only 9 people in my class and 75 students in the entire school — meaning there were fewer students in the whole school than the number of new students in the previous one. The school had no problems at all; food, water, dormitory — all of these were much better than my first school. People had spoken so badly about that school that they had unknowingly created a treasure. The biggest problem was that the students there couldn’t see that treasure at all. When I entered the dormitory, it felt like stepping into an animal farm, but saying that “would be disrespectful to the animals.”

I stayed there for about two weeks, and the final day before dropping out completely had arrived. I was excited and nervous because I was about to bring one of my hardest and most important thoughts to life. The students there kept looking at me with confused expressions and asking, “Why are you dropping out?” But despite everything, I left the school and entered real life.

In all my observations, I saw that everything was shaped by the wrong beliefs of society. The school they called the worst was actually the best one, but the students believed it was the worst, so they treated it like a zoo. And the so-called best school had the most weak-willed students because they believed their school was the best and accepted everything as it was.

Through all of this, I formed the biggest thought of my life:
“Never accept everything as it is, because what is right for everyone else might be wrong for you.”