My first year (and collegiate career) weren't entirely that messed up. But it was close. I'd escaped - escaped the insanity at home (although I didn't really understand it was insane), escaped the dead-end town (that it was a dead-end I'd know since second grade and had been trying like a dog on a choke collar to flee for most of my life), escaped the expectations (I was at college, I could be, do, ANYTHING) that were going to try in four years to take me back to all that I loathed. I was damned if I was going back. But that first taste of freedom...

Any wonder that I lost my head? Like you, I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, I didn't do drugs, barely did boys, and didn't take up obnoxious addictions (like early Doom and telnet based gaming). I did start watching anime (once a week, and upon suffering of the 3rd year with the tapes). Instead I got drunk on the people, the ideas, the reading...and made what was to prove, over and over again, a fatal mistake.

I overloaded my class schedule with my _ideal_ schedule - as if I was Marie Curie, Archimedes, Octavio Paz, and James Joyce in one little 5'2" package, rather than some scrapy kid from a second rate public high school. I took three honors classes (should never had been in them) and another final on the same day (this is, btw, was against school policy, but at that time it didn't leash undergrads, much less intervene when they did something _incredibly_ stupid). I realized in the reading period (all two days of it, another anachronism I understand is long gone from my alma mater) that I was screwed, which is why I made the 2nd fatal mistake that near destroyed me.

I didn't ask for help. So when I woke up late, the morning of my FOUR finals, I found my roommate had let me sleep in, and that my first final has already started.

I'm not athletic, which is why someone must have found the picture of a chubby undergrad, clad in only sneakers, a plaid night gown, and a serape sprinting through two feet of snow across campus with a TI-85 and blue books clenched in one hand, and pencils/pens in the other, hilarious. All I remember is the snow, the cold, and the sudden teleportation to a science room with 150 of other students and a broken desk.

Amazingly I did well in three of the finals; I don't remember much about that first final other than the terror in my heart. I came home with a C, bunch of Bs and A. I expected kudos for my achievement - miraculous given the situation - and got nothing but got nothing by shit from the fam. I returned for the next 3 years, no wiser, because I repeated the same pattern (sans the sprint-at least I learned from that!) again and again.

>Fast-forward to 2011, on the brink of 2012. I'm back in school with
>less mental bandwidth than ever, fully and paranoiacally aware that
>this is my last shot at the big time. My parents are approaching
>their sixtieth birthdays. Won't be long before I'm supposed to be
>looking after them, and that's if nothing goes wrong. If I don't
>finish some sort of degree that can lead to a career, as opposed to
>the series of vocational errors my working life has consisted of to
>this point, I'm screwed and conceivably so are they.

When I turned 30 and went to grad school, terrified I'd fuck it all up again, this is exactly what I was thinking. I had clawed my way into a good job in the financial services industry, but it was 2005 and, dude I could see it coming. So I knew I had to get out or get buried.

I did fuck up some of the classes that first year - a full time job + full time grad school = bad idea - but I'd learned to ask for help. And that, as the poet says, made the difference. Maybe I don't have the highest gpa of my grad program, but my thesis made honors and I landed a job that is proving to be the launching pad for a complete new career.

I'm only an MA but a published author (usually 4th or 5th) in top tier journals in my field. My first, first author publications just came out this month. I've been producing about 1 paper/report a month for the last six months. And I'm expecting our first child early next year. When I get back from maternity leave (if I don't screw the pooch between now and birth) I should be in better professional position than ever. At 37. About 17 years later than I should have been if school had gone right, and if I'd known then what I knew now.

As they say, you never can tell.

t.

{author's note: I feel like I've told this story before on the Forum. I wonder how much has changed in my memories between then and now. Hope I haven't bored y'all if this is a repeat -t.}

Trigger Argee
Manon, Maccadon, Orado, etc.
Denton, never leave home without it.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - HST