Major Life Decisions

[jain]

I'm not going to be returning to college this fall. My parents are not pleased, and my friends are concerned, and I'm feeling slightly guilty. The worst part is, this is such a recurring theme in my life. It took me five years to get through high school, and it looks like it'll take me at least seven before I get my fricking bachelor's degree.

On the other hand, I'm really hating being here. I hate my classes, I hate writing essays, I hate learning--and that's never happened to me in my life. I want to try doing something else for a while; ideally, I'll find a nice internship doing editorial work or something, but at the least I want to live away from my family for a while and do things that probably only I find impressive, like doing all my own grocery shopping and learning how to use public transportation.

I'm pretty sure I'm making the right decision, as much as it galls me to yet again demonstrate my inability to live a normal life. I mean, everyone else manages to finish college and get a driver's license and so forth with no apparent difficulty. But I can't countenance spending thousands of dollars to go to college when I'm not deriving anything of value from the experience, and doing the bare minimum in my classes while remaining unmoved by what I'm learning really isn't worth much.

Comments

timetables

[(Anonymous)]

I quit college once. Because of a suicide attempt, when education just seemed too monolithic to handle and death was preferable to failure. The net result of that was a diploma that looked just as pretty and Latiny as everyone else's, the chance to meet some freshmen I wouldn't otherwise have known, a semester taking makeup classes with the Nuns from Hell, which would be an autobiographical book if it didn't sound so bloody fictional, and the opportunity to watch other people become nervous around me in case I did something crazy in front of them. The rest of ot was okay, but that last part was not worth it. Take the time now _before_ you really really need it the way I did. Then go back to school- and it'll be better. So I graduated with the 'wrong' class. Who cares? Get a job for the intervening time, write some poetry or whatever, and survive. Education isn't meant to kill us... contrary to what is apparently common belief among profs. Give yourself a semester or a year, and then spit in its eye.
-Shadowdancer

Re: timetables

[jain]

Thank you for sharing your story with me. It really helped me to put the whole situation into perspective. The Nuns from Hell sound screamingly funny--though I'm sure the reality was quite different.