If I could talk to my younger self, I'd say: stop comparing yourself to other people and pick the subject you actually enjoy. I'm thirty now and I teach music at a primary school in Mumbai, so it's funny to look back on how stressed I used to be.
I'd give that advice to myself at about sixteen, just before choosing my subjects for the last two years of school.
At that time, almost everyone in my class was going into science, aiming for engineering or medicine. My cousins were all engineers too, so there was a lot of quiet pressure. I loved music and had been learning the tabla since I was eight, but I didn't think it counted as a serious path. So I chose physics, chemistry and maths, and spent two pretty miserable years forcing myself through them.
This advice would have helped because I wasted a lot of energy measuring myself against classmates who genuinely loved science. My marks were average, my confidence dropped, and I stopped practising the tabla almost completely. Eventually, after a year at an engineering college, I dropped out and switched to a music degree, which upset my parents at first. If I'd followed my own interests from the start, I'd have saved myself time and a fair bit of anxiety. I'd also have arrived at my real career with more skill, because those lost years of practice matter a lot in music. Interestingly, my parents are proud of me now, so I'd tell my younger self that the fear was much bigger than the reality.