I’m so tired of being told I’m good at something I never wanted to be a part of my life and never being told I’m good at things I actually want to become better at. It’s a constant blow to my self-esteem to try and be better at something that I work so hard on, try and show my progress to someone I care about only for them to respond in a way that makes it seem like my efforts are unimpressive, mundane, average, or some sort of joke. I try so hard at becoming the person I try to make myself into and it feels like no one notices my efforts. I receive constant praise for things that I was dictated to do since I was young and I don’t want those things to be the resounding characteristics of my nature.
Learning and acquiring skills have always been a challenge for me, I don’t know why. When I see other people get the hang of skills, knowledge, or abilities in hours it takes takes me days to execute. College was no exception. College was, for me, a waste of time and money.
At 17/18, I had little to no drive or ambition at all for anything. I was so tired with life, the people in it, the way people had treated me that I wanted some form of an escape or vacation before I killed myself. I was tired all the time from taking care of my father at home, trying to live up to my mother’s academic expectations for me, keeping up with all the lies about who I was, how I felt, and why I was hurting. I wasn’t actively trying to kill myself either, don’t get me wrong. I just didn’t have the balls or ambition to do that either. But I didn’t shy away from death either and I kept making excuses why I wouldn’t just off myself earlier and earlier.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, and eventually around my the end of my senior year, my parents presented for me a false dichotomy of either going to college or trying to find a job as a drug dealer or burger flipper at McDonald’s. By March of my senior year, my parents really pushed for the cheaper option of the local community college so I could stay at home instead of the far away state college with their dorms, frats, and hundreds of Queer guys living without parental supervision. Because I didn’t want to be with my tormentors for another four years, I saw going to the somewhat far away college as a break from my parents that I could to still contemplate the thought of suicide. I figured I’d milk out the most money from my parents for two or three years, get wasted, plastered, high, and fuck as many guys as I could and then go ahead and either overdose or get alcohol poisoning from too much partying. After all, dumping my parents with tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt would be the best insult after attending my funeral.
Unfortunately, as we can all tell by reading this, I did not die while I was in college. I graduated (reluctantly), with a B.A. in political science and a 2.31 G.P.A. Whoopee. Do I still regret going to college? Somewhat. In what ways do I regret it? I regret it for the major I took. In fact, I didn’t know what major I really wanted to do. I originally went to my school acting headstrong about wanting to be a biology major because that was a respectable science that I was the best at in high school and that I knew would keep my parents off my back. I flopped majors after my father died, I was engineering, nursing, English, and a journalism major at some point. I honestly didn’t know what I should’ve done with the two years I had already spent there. I ended up just going to the guidance counselor and saying, “Okay what major can I declare that’ll get me out of here in the next two years?”. I picked political science because the classes that were required for the major seemed interesting enough and a majority of what I was binge watching on YouTube anyways.
Those classes where honestly all jokes. There really wasn’t anything that I did learn during my time there and I would bullshit every paper and assignment I had to do there in every class. I was trying to get out of college at this point and just trying to squeeze by with the bare minimum. I didn’t understand how the people around me could take these classes oh so seriously and actively strive to get A’s in the class. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with this major after leaving college and I was surprised that other people’s answer was simple and each the same; grad school.
However, I started to get my shit together and start to mentally heal about two years into my time at college. Any major I had high hopes for myself in studying I would have to be taking intro classes with a bunch of freshmen and adding another 3.5-4 years to my time in school. My parents weren’t made of money and there was no way I was going to be able to be able to get enough financial aid and scholarships to add another 4 years to my already messy college career. Those first two years at college I was going along with my plan mostly of having an unhinged, hedonistic time smoking, drinking, and taking whatever intoxicant I could handle and sleeping with any guy that was willing to. My grades of course suffered in the process but at the time I didn’t care. I was really good at the language classes I was taking like Chinese and Japanese, but apart from that my grades where utter dogshit. The last semester before I started to get my shit together and the semester where my father died my G.P.A. was… are you ready for it…? I’m kind of embarrased to say this…
0.47
That was my G.P.A. for my spring semester of my sophomore year in college. The only thing keeping that G.P.A. from a flat 0.00 is my A in Chinese and a D in my physics class. My overall G.P.A. was slightly better at 1.43. And somehow, after 2 years of still not knowing how to properly study or ask for help and still not have the ambition to be better I squeezed by with a 2.31. I have a state job that pays a little more than a teacher here in IL, and yeah there are easy ways for me to move up and about within the state and earn more money. If I could go back I don’t know what I would do differently if I was 18 again in the summer of 2014. Maybe I would’ve gone to community college if I knew my dad was going to die soon. Maybe I would’ve been able to develop some new interests and become a better person than who I am now. Or maybe I wouldn’t change much because I’d still be the same person with maybe only the slight advantage of the power of hindsight. So, I guess if you were to ask me while I was at my own graduation ceremony if I were to be able to go back in time and do things differently, would I? I probably would’ve given you a hard yes with 1,000 reasons why I should and only about 10 as to why I shouldn’t.


