(Cote) Random stuff

Weekend

Weekends at Advanced Nurturing High School were supposed to feel like freedom, but freedom without direction only created a different kind of pressure. 

When nothing was demanded from you, you were forced to confront the question you usually avoided: what do I actually want to do?

Saturday morning came without urgency. Light passed through the thin curtains of my dorm room and settled on the floor in a dull, indifferent shape. I stayed on my bed longer than necessary, not because I was tired, but because there was no reason to move. When time had no structure, action lost its meaning. Getting up now or ten minutes later made no difference. Even an hour later wouldn't change anything.

I checked my phone. No messages. No notifications. That wasn't strange. I didn't exist in the kind of social network that generated casual contact. I wasn't part of a group that talked just to fill silence. My relationships here were built on necessity—on exams, on strategies, on shared danger inside this system. During the week, that necessity forced us together. On weekends, when that structure disappeared, so did most reasons to speak.

People liked to believe they were social by nature, but that wasn't true. They were social by context. Remove the context, and many of them didn't know what to say anymore.

I sat up and looked around my room. It was clean. Minimal. Functional. There was nothing in it that revealed anything about me as a person. No photos, no decorations, no signs of attachment. It looked less like a bedroom and more like a temporary shelter. A place meant for staying, not living.

That suited me.

I poured a glass of water and drank it slowly. The sound echoed too clearly in the quiet room. Silence here wasn't comforting. It was exposed. Like standing in an empty hallway where every step you took announced your presence. During the week, I could disappear into routines and expectations. On weekends, I was left alone with my own awareness.

And awareness was dangerous.

When you were forced to look at your life without distractions, you started asking questions you couldn't answer quickly. Not "what should I do today?" but "what am I doing at all?"

I sat at the desk and opened a random book from the shelf. A philosophy text I barely remembered buying. I flipped a few pages, letting my eyes move without really reading. Words passed through my mind without staying. My thoughts were somewhere else.

Dostoevsky once suggested that people don't actually want freedom—they want to escape the responsibility that comes with it. Freedom meant choosing. And choosing meant being accountable for the result. That idea felt uncomfortably accurate.

Here, on weekends, we were given freedom. No orders. No structure. No excuses.

If I stayed in my room all day, that choice would belong to me.
If I went out and met someone, that choice would also belong to me.
There was no system to blame.

Doing nothing wasn't neutral. It was a decision.

And decisions revealed intent.

I closed the book.

The truth was simple: I didn't know what I wanted.

Not in the normal teenage sense. I didn't want popularity. I didn't want romance. I didn't want recognition. Those things had never motivated me. My life until now had been built around survival, not desire. Around control, not connection.

But survival without a threat turned into stagnation.

When there was no enemy, no pressure, no test, what was left?