Will I, Can I Have Any Validation?

22 June 2025, three months before the deadline

“Well, it was lovely talking to you, Kush, and thank you so much for choosing Comprehensive Sex Education as the topic of your dissertation. Best of luck with your documentary.”

I ended the Meet call and shut off my laptop.

“Whew! Conducting an interview is not as difficult as I thought. It was a good conversation. I got all my answers, and thanks to Ms Suchita’s words of affirmation about my topic and how well-researched I was, I feel good about it.”

“It was a good decision to approach a sex-education teacher and psychologist for this subject. Maybe, if I execute this properly, I will finally find the validation I have been seeking all along. But, Kush, you cannot mess this up with your habitual laziness and procrastination.”

“Yeah, yeah, it is June. I will start recording in July and editing in August, and I will be finished before the deadline so that I can get plenty of feedback from my supervisor.”

“You make great plans—if only you ever executed one.”

“This time will be different.”

I marched towards the kitchen while having this usual two-way conversation with myself, as always.

18 September 2025, 12 hours before the deadline

“This one-hour, poorly edited and recorded video does not feel like a documentary, and it certainly does not feel like a final dissertation project.”

“I had been asking you to submit your draft for a month, and you sent me one the night before the submission. That, combined with your work being so choppy, clearly shows that all of this was done at the last minute.”

“This is the first time I am seeing your so-called documentary, and you knew that you should have received at least two rounds of feedback from your supervisor.”

“The only advice I can give you is to remove the video. It is very off-putting. Try to turn it into an audio documentary. Try to make it more interesting—or at least watchable.”

I closed the email window and shut off my laptop.

“How stupid am I? I do this every time. I waste all my time, procrastinate on all my work until the eleventh hour, and then miss my deadline at ten in the morning.”

“No matter how serious the situation is or how valuable the examination is—whether it is my Grade 12 final examination, an end-of-semester examination during my bachelor’s degree, or this final dissertation—all my preparation starts the night before.”

“I perform terribly on the final day, and then, with a fool’s hope, I expect great marks in my results, even though my performance reeks of carelessness and my input is below average.”

I marched towards the kitchen, accusing myself of dragging me to this low point as I accepted the feedback on my first and only draft, with fewer than 12 hours left before submission.

Flashback

19 August 2025

The picture still held some hope as I looked outside the large window in my new room.

I had given myself a break of two or three days to recover from the physical and mental strain I had undergone while moving from my hostel into this 4BHK house with my friends.

So, there would be no gym or dieting until the weekend, and I would continue after the break I had taken from doing my dissertation since the interview in June.

I mean, I was kind of working on it—sharpening the narrative and tightening some of the timelines and data for the project—but it was nothing very substantial.

I really liked my room. The large window allowed a huge chunk of sunlight inside during the day, and at night, it painted a quiet and peaceful picture of moonlight bouncing off the symmetrical houses spread across the sheet of our street.

Nights were a wonderful time to spend in that room. When every house went into dark mode and I turned on my yellow-orange light, the window became a mirror reflecting the inside of my room. At that moment, I could see both the outside and inside worlds through the glass—a car appearing to drive through my centre table.

Also, with time, I was recovering from the pain of my grandmother’s death. I was low-key excited about the housewarming party we were going to host, but much of that excitement came from having lost a noticeable amount of weight.

I also thought that I really deserved a break from both the gym and dieting because I had spent the previous two months frustratedly folding clothes in a shop from nine in the morning until six in the evening, two days a week.

The frustration and tiredness had simply become two new excuses for me to delay my dissertation. I had been raised with too much privilege to accept that this amount of work was very normal.

The break obviously continued for much longer time.

17 September 2025

My mind and body were both working in panic mode because whatever I managed to pull off during the final 48 hours would ultimately determine whether the thousands of pounds spent on me by my very middle-class family had been worth it.

To give you an estimate, it was around £25,000. Some of it was covered by a student loan, but the attached social pressure of failing and disappointing my family made every penny feel extremely heavy on my shoulders.

As I turned on the front camera of my iPad, there was a guy in a red shirt and black spectacles, fixing his hair every ten seconds while sitting in front of a neutral background of green curtains hanging beside a very large window.

It was still daytime outside because I wanted to reserve the night for editing. I had finished recording and was tired of saying the same things repeatedly, so I took a break.

I started editing and, in between, kept looking at my window as it began reflecting a parked truck and the well-lit window of the house opposite.

As I stared into it, thoughts of disappointment and of losing my final chance to receive validation through my work bounced around my mind and consciousness.

I went to sleep hoping for positive feedback from my supervisor.

18 September 2025, 12 hours before the deadline

My supervisor was away on holiday, so he could only get back to me at night. After receiving his feedback, I had given up all hope of passing the degree.

I had already thought of using “the university deliberately fails students to improve its rankings” as a victim card to play with my parents and my future.

I tried to fix the one hour of poorly made video by writing another script for an audio documentary while retaining the good parts of the original video.

I edited the interview and stitched everything together. I did not think I had enough material or editing skill to make it interesting as a black-screen audio documentary.

A few seconds late, but in the end, I submitted an audio documentary that did not have any impressive sound effects—just a bland mixture of me explaining the problem and connecting it with an interview.

There was no chance in hell that I was passing this. Yet somehow, my shameless conscience was still thinking that a miracle would get me a Merit or Distinction.

The audacity.

28 November 2025

My frustration with part-time work had surpassed my tolerance level, as I was now working nights in a grocery shop, lifting boxes two days a week.

I worked for two nights and slept throughout the day for the whole week.

Everything outside was orange, and it was a few minutes before my favourite window-staring time of day. This time, I was already in the kitchen, trying to divide my attention between the sitcom playing on my iPad and a hot pot of boiling water with ramen noodles inside it.

The notification containing my result popped up on both my phone and iPad.

I could not stir the just-softened ramen noodles, so I turned off the gas. Either everything was happening in slow motion, or I was voluntarily moving my hands very slowly to delay the declaration of my disappointment.

I swallowed through my suddenly dry throat as I entered my details. The webpage buffered for a few seconds, and I assumed the worst.

The page opened. I skipped everything and looked directly at the final mark in the table.

The Last Wednesday of January 2026

I had been trying for several weeks to restart my life in my home country while considering giving my life in the UK another chance.

But I was so frightened by my procrastination gene that I could not say anything to my family.

In the evening, as I was making a vegetarian snack in the kitchen because my mother did not allow meat, my phone rang. It was one of my older cousins, who began the conversation with a simple question:

“Why?”

“Why did you come back? You should have stayed there for some more time. The market is very difficult right now, but you should not give up so soon.”

When she said all this, my mother and sister sided with her, and I sided with her internally.

I was still shit-scared, but the feedback kept playing in my mind, hitting and numbing all the doubts and fear.

The following Sunday, I was on a flight back to the UK. It was a long flight during which I tried not to think about my talent for procrastination and laziness.

To counter those thoughts, I kept thinking about the feedback.

“What you have done with the subject is very impressive. It is wonderful to see how sensitively you have dealt with the topic.”

“The facts and research are extremely helpful to the whole case. The interview was an integral part of the documentary, and it proved its worth.”

“You asked all the right questions, covering the basics of a very complex problem. The editing could have been tighter, and there is plenty of scope for improvement, but this project places you on the right path towards becoming a journalist.”

I received a good mark: 67 in my dissertation, which helped push me into the Merit bracket.

The execution and post-production had some leaks and holes, but perhaps the treatment of the story was something.

The feedback gave me a little validation. It was that feedback that convinced my drunken self to say out loud that I wanted to come back and give it one more try.