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My History With Education

Growing up I was the furthest thing from being interested in taking school seriously. My mother Kerry was the Dean of engineering at a computer science college in Colorado Springs and she would be gone for many hours of the day, sometimes not arriving home until late at night. My father was a stay at home dad who spent most of his time watching sports on television, cleaning the house or running errands. He had retired from the dental hygriene industry sometime around 2001 to take care of my brother and I full time. I treated school as a place where I could show up to look good like I had my my shit together and as a place to socialize with the other kids. Academically however, I had very little interest in performing well as I found most classes to be boring and a waste of time.

It wasn’t that I was a smart kid who failed to find any challenge in my assignments or that I could whizz through a test and score high effortlessly, I actually fit into the category of kids who not only found school difficult, but barely tried at all. Each day after school was over, I would immediately retire to my room to play some Xbox, playstation or gamecube and spend many a hour getting my game time on! This would occasionally lead to my parents intervening, especially during high school, but that did little overall to prevent me from prioritizing video games over homework. From very early on, I was determined to “do my own thing” and ignore what the adults in my life thought I should be doing, in favor of following my own whims and desires. My father didn’t appear to be monitoring me very closely, so I could get away with neglecting my education for very long stretches of time without being confronted about it.

As young as thirteen years old, I remember thinking to myself “Why doesn’t someone just hand me a shovel and pay me a few bucks an hour to dig a hole somewhere? This shit is boring and a waste of time!”. This attitude remained roughly the same for many years, in fact, I seriously doubt I legitimately earned my high school graduation degree. I don’t know if it had something to do with “No Child Left Behind” or anything else, but in retrospect I think my parents and many teachers just thought “Okay, let’s just get him out of here”. I could be wrong about that though. Even if I am, I suspect I just barely qualified to earn my high school graduation degree. From that point moving forward, I had many dramatic ups and downs in life-including some really “strong” decisions (a few of them were definitely bad) that sort of shaped the trajectory of where I was heading in my life, over the next few years.

Identity Crisis & Formation

In my early twenties, I got into drugs and that turned into an entire arc that was especially strong in 2015 and 2016 with the worst of it being behind me by the time 2017 rolled around. After that point, I had rough patches in the road where I would stay sober for a week or two, then relapse again. Usually on something fairly minor like weed, kava, kratom or alcohol. It took some time to start getting serious about recovery from my substance addictions and even longer from my other vices (sex and money). I would describe the period between 2015-2019 as the “Still figuring shit out” era. It was a time when I didn’t know who I was and especially in the beginning-who I even wanted to be. This lead to me going on what we might call some “detours” before I finally got back onto my main path in life where I’m at today. A place that I feel more closely aligns with my sense of purpose, identity and direction.

2019 was the year I took a leap of faith and quit my job at Goodwill as a janitor, without having another job lined up and got hired at an Amazon Fulfillment center in Denver. This one decision changed everything for me and paved the way to brighter days in the future. Especially since Amazon employees can enjoy a generous tuition program, which helps pay for the schooling. However, this wouldn’t even be up for serious consideration until 2024. By the time Spring of 2024 came around I was starting to become deeply unfulfilled with my job at Amazon, which I had had for around five years by that point. That’s when the aches and pains of the physical labor associated with my employment began to catch up with me. I started to ask myself “How many more years can I really keep this up for?”, “Would I rather be doing something else?”.

The Breakdown Cometh Before The Breakthrough

I knew that I had always been interested in psychology and mental health. As far back as middle school, I would read books like “Chicken Soup For The Teenage Soul” and some of Alan H. Cohen’s books, as well as “Psychology For Dummies” and other books associated with the topic. I knew that over the years, I had really come to admire people in the mental health space and wanted to do what they were doing-the counselors. Especially since I had been in therapy my whole life and found it to be helpful. Every day that I would go to work, I would feel my soul leaving my body. I would be feeling drained each day, sick and tired to the point where even the usual three day weekends I had weren’t enough for me. They’d be done in the blink of an eye and I’d be right back where I started the week before; tired, bored, frustrated and growing more impatient by the day. I managed to suck it up for awhile, but eventually hit a crossroads where I could no longer tolerate it anymore and that’s the point at which I started going back to school.

I took two classes at once in the Spring; an english course and a Psych 101 course. I passed my psychology course with the highest possible grade and finished my english course with a B. I remember this era of going to school as being nostalgic to me. With my parent’s funding and approval, they scooped up money from my college fund to help pay for a new MacBook Pro (the very one I’m typing this blog on right now). I would spend hours at a time at my local coffee shop, a place called “Death Of The Fox” and work hard composing notes for my classes, studying and completing coursework. Sometimes I would try other cafe venues around southern Jersey to mix it up a bit. I couldn’t tell you how many cups of coffee and snacks I bought during that time, it probably amounted to over one hundred dollars by the time I finished both courses.

After I finished my first two courses, some months would pass before I would go back to school once more. This time I took a psych 102 and another english class. The problem was I was spending too much money going out to cafes and it occured to me that I needed a place to study at home, so I asked my parents to pay for furniture to help build a new office in my home, which they did! I had bought a new desk that plugged into the wall where I could put my cellphone down and charge it wirelessly, a new filing cabinet to keep important tax documents and schoolwork in, a fancy new lamp to put on top of my desk and a couple of decorations such as a miniature hourglass to complete the setup.

As it would turn out, this new arrangement worked out perfectly for me as I moved my coffee machine upstairs to the guest bedroom (where the office is) so I could keep myself caffeinated for long hours of studying and working. I also bought a square wall plug in with multiple outlets on it, so I could plug into my desk for the charger, a new two-hundred dollar massage chair and a small foot massager. My parents believed strongly that education was very important and they spent many years saving up for me to go to college, so I had a beefy budget that would allow me to afford a nice setup, to boot. It may have taken some time for me to finally make that decision, but ultimately it has been worth it! Even with all of the headaches associated with spending long nights working on essays and completing assignments in all three of my courses (with a fourth one coming up soon), I sometimes still feel overwhelmed with my schooling, even as a full time student with plenty of time on his hands.

Seeing that I was miserable at Amazon, my parents decided to help chip in on some bills so that I could stay as a full time student, with me occasionally taking on odd jobs through Gigsmart and Uber to help pay the rest. Because I’m fortunate enough to have a mother who is now a retired teacher, we sometimes chat on Zoom with her giving me one-on-one tutoring and study sessions. I humbly recognize that I am privileged with some opportunities here and I intend to not take them for granted! The advantage of having my mother as a former teacher is that she knows I have learning disabilities and difficulties, so she has helped me immensely by developing strategies for studying which have proven to be very effective!

Last night, we reviewed chapters five and six together for the second time and I memorized much of the material and understood it well, so I went to go take the chapter five and six test for my online college course and scored ninety percent out of one hundred in six minutes! I’ve had some bumps in the road during my academic journey thus far, but seeing these results has been one of the proudest moments of my life! I found the test to be very easy and I picked up some new vocabulary with astonishing quickness that I don’t normally possess (to be honest, it was probably because I got plenty of sleep).

It seems that I am well on my way to becoming a counselor. Though it is still too early for me to celebrate just yet, I can see that I am making powerful breakthroughs in learning. I also find the material (most of it anyway) interesting, learning about things such as Psychosocial Moratorium (look it up, kind of an interesting read!) and understanding how children, adolescence and young adults evolve cognitively and emotionally. I believe that as I continue to learn more in my courses, I will have more “fodder” to add to my future blogs, making them more interesting and once I get my citation skills mastered, I’ll be able to talk in-depth about more interesting topics, likely from an academic perspective rather than just a personal one! In closing, I just want to say that going back to school has been surprisingly fun and challenging in a way that sometimes pushes me to my mental limits, but also stays interesting because of that fact. If you haven’t earned a degree yet and want to do something different with your life, I would recommend reconsidering it. Even for someone like me who has always hated school with a passion, I’m beginning to realize that I can succeed as well.