Si Shangshang has known since she was a child that there is no place for her in this family.
Her mother's hands were always cold, and her father's gaze always passed through her and landed further away. The sandwich biscuits in her cousin Si Zhuangzhuang's hands were luxury goods that she had seen but never asked for. The old clothes handed over by her cousin Xu Mengyao with a smile were "goodwill" that she had to accept with a smile.
When she was nine years old, her mother died of illness, and she didn't even see her for the last time.
When she was fifteen years old, her grandfather passed away, leaving her only a rag bag containing several hundred dollars.
Everyone thought she would fall silently into the soil like a speck of dust.
But she didn't.
From the bottom of the class to the top ten in grade, from the depths of the mountains to key universities, from no one expecting it to no one being able to define it - it took her fifteen years to dig out the word "talent" bit by bit from the suffering.
Si Zhuangzhuang was a precocious young man, but he finally grew into an ordinary person; Xu Mengyao was perfect all the way, but lost to her incomprehensible resilience. And the grandma who always held her hand never taught her how to make money, how to study, or how to succeed. She just did the simplest thing:
It didn't make her doubt that she was worthy of love.
Later, many people asked Si Shangshang when he started to become smart.
She thought about it for many years.
It was probably not the report card that changed my life when I was fifteen, nor was it the time when I made my first pot of gold.
What really changed her was never a single moment.
It was those days when no one saw her, it was the fact that she still sat there after getting the questions wrong again and again, it was the reason why she wiped away her tears and continued writing after her grandfather left, it was the reason why she finally had the ability to protect her when her grandma got old.
She was once judged useless by everyone.
But later she understood——
Talent can be late, but suffering is never in vain.
And a person's true journey to the top is never about standing higher than others.
One day, she could finally calmly look at the way she came, and then tell herself:
In this life, I have not let myself down.
Concept: The so-called talent is sometimes only seen after being pushed to the extreme by suffering.