Off the record
A reflection on grades, weight, likes, and the terrifying human instinct to turn numbers into identity.
Numbers can flatten an entire life into something that looks clean and decimal-shaped. They’re followed by meaning and that meaning always stretches a little further than it should, because numbers feel certain. (Illustration By: Hannah Arabella Gabling // The Underground)
There are numbers I check without thinking. It usually happens in small, quiet moments. Sitting on the bus, opening and closing random apps until I land on the white and red. The glow of my Quercus dashboard lights up before I’ve even decided what I’m looking for. I tell myself I’m just checking what’s upcoming, maybe a new announcement. But my cursor drifts almost instinctively to “Grades.” There’s always a pause before I click it, like my body knows the psychological risk involved. Then the page loads and my eyes scan quickly, already knowing where to land. The number appears, clean and final, sitting there like it has authority. Sometimes it does.
It’s ridiculous how quickly my mood can rearrange itself because of a percentage. One little number and my brain starts scouring my life for any potential hidden talents.
I remember one afternoon sitting in the UTSC library during midterm season. It was that kind of afternoon where the air felt heavy with the stress of everyone’s collective academic deterioration. Highlighters were uncapped, coffee cups were condensating with forgotten iced beverages, and everyone looked one minor inconvenience away from a crash out. I refreshed my laptop three times before my mark showed up. When it finally did, I stared at it longer than I needed to. It wasn’t even a bad grade. It just wasn’t what I had imagined. And somehow, that difference lingered. It felt like my brain had already started adjusting the way it saw me, based on a number that took less than a second to read. It’s strange because it’s never just about the assignment. It becomes something else almost instantly. A number turns into a sentence, and the sentence turns into a belief.
Slipping. Locked in. Doing fine. Falling behind. Ate and left no crumbs.
The language is subtle, but it stays, and it’s not just contained to academics. There are mornings where the first thing I do is step onto a scale, before I’ve even had water, before I’ve fully woken up. The number flashes up, and for a second, everything feels suspended. Not because the number actually changes my worth in any meaningful way… obviously. But because my brain has unfortunately been marinating in the quantification of selfhood since birth.
And I can imagine for people who post on social media, it’s probably a similar experience, posting something casually and then circling back to check the numbers in ways that feel both detached and deeply personal. Pretending it’s curiosity when really, you’re performing forensic analysis on your own likability.
But a GPA doesn’t show the week your body felt like it was buffering. The lecture you replayed so many times the professor’s voice started sounding less like a human being and more like the automated announcement on the TTC. It doesn’t account for the nights where your laptop was open for six straight hours while you learned absolutely nothing except new and inventive ways to panic. It’s the kind of panic that has you researching graduate school statistics, then housing prices, then whether stress can physically age a person. Forty minutes gone forever. Academic terrorism by your own tabs.
A scale doesn’t know if you spent the past month stress-eating rotisserie chicken over the sink to hit your protein goals like a medieval king. It doesn’t know about hormones or grief or finals season or the specific psychological damage of seeing someone from high school looking suspiciously radiant on LinkedIn.
Numbers can flatten an entire life into something that looks clean and decimal-shaped. They’re followed by meaning and that meaning always stretches a little further than it should, because numbers feel certain. They don’t hesitate or explain themselves, they just present a result, and something about that simplicity makes it easy to trust them more than we should.
A grade can stay a grade.
A weight can stay a weight.
A number on a screen can stay a number on a screen.
The numbers remain, of course they do. GPAs, calories, likes, unread emails, step counts, bank balances; they are tiny digital verdicts everywhere. But most of life still happens off the record, in ways that refuse to become measurable no matter how badly we try to quantify them.
