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

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

Don't discount the importance of doing things yourself, even if they seem like stupid little things.

When I was just barely 18, I left the US to visit my boyfriend in the UK and stay for the summer. I was supposed to go to NYU in the fall. I'm still in the UK. (Don't have a degree yet, either. Had a go at a UK uni, and managed about a year and a half, but I was getting bored. I Will Finish Eventually.)

Looking back on it all now- I regret not going to NYU only because I think I would really enjoy the course. (I was supposed to study film.) I would love to be able to go now and do it. Otherwise, I think not doing it and coming over here and having to learn how to get on with my life on my own is the best thing I've ever done. (We'll leave out the fact that I've got myself a wonderful partner, too. :) The knowledge that you *can* deal with things in the Real World when they come up is a real confidence boost, and it's made me much more secure in just being Me.

The attitude over here regarding finishing "high school" and starting at university is very different to the US- it's perfectly normal here to take a year out in between one and the other to do whatever (a lot of people go backpacking around Europe, but others just stay in the UK and work, or...) and I wish it was more like that in the US, because I think it makes a great sanity saver. :)

Just remember that there's nothing wrong with not following the beaten path.(And I'm with you- there's no point in slogging through it just to get through it when you could be getting so much more out of it. Do what you need to do to rediscover how to enjoy the process. I left uni over here about a year ago, and I'm only just now starting to feel like I really want to go out and learn things again. I just got too stressed and burnt out.)

[jain]

Thanks for the encouragement, and for sharing your own story with me. (I'd actually been wondering about how you ended up in the UK, after having read a bit about your life in your lj, and it was nice to have the backstory filled in.) I've always been very goal-oriented--in intent if not in practice--and then very disappointed in myself when I couldn't fulfill those goals. It's good to be reminded that how one ends up living life is less important than focusing on really living it.