This essay was originally written in Chinese on October 12, 2025.
I often find myself looking back.
Even before I became an OI contestant, I knew how badly I wanted to win.
Victory made the world feel clear and orderly. It told me that my choices were right, that my efforts had meaning, and that I was still allowed to move forward.
But I could not always win.
Whenever I realized this, I did not know how to step back calmly. Instead, I tended to choose the most extreme path, as if one desperate gamble could turn everything around. I imagined that by going all in, I might recover whatever I had lost.
Before the high school entrance exam, a series of setbacks nearly overwhelmed me. During the final weeks of preparation, while teachers reviewed homework and exam papers, I often sat in front of a blank sheet of paper. My thoughts wandered to questions that sounded childish, yet genuinely troubled me. Some of them still remain unanswered.
And yet, I really wanted to enter ZHZX. It felt like a promise I had once made to my younger self. So I did what little I could. I tried to memorize humanities material I had never studied before. I kept telling myself that everything would be fine, though on the night before the exam, I still could not sleep.
Fortunately, the result was much better than I had expected. For a short while, I thought this might prove that the story I told myself was true.
But there was no time to celebrate. Another round of training began immediately, just as it had during my final year of junior high school. The only difference was that this time, mistakes no longer felt affordable.
I began to wonder: if I had been given certain gifts, then what had been taken from me in return?
Old friends faded from my life, along with those who had only seemed like friends. The girl I once admired, who had sat beside me for two years, has become someone I may hardly ever meet again. In the end, I found myself standing alone, holding the chips I had once been proud of — the same chips I was about to lose.
I have played many card games, and I know one thing well: people with truly bad hands often fold early. It is those who believe their hands are promising who choose to go all in.
But what was my trump card?
Talent? I doubt that a few brief flashes of insight can truly be called talent.
Hard work? I have never been as hardworking as people might imagine.
Perhaps what I held was neither talent nor effort, but only the illusion that I still had something worth betting on. And perhaps that is why I keep looking back: I am still searching for the moment when I first mistook chips for destiny.