Picture it, five years ago. A high school kid, not social, but not particularly lonely. No real experiences but a lot of fake ones that people believed. All this kid wanted to do was something. Anything. Well this kid, he was told by his parents that college was important to get a job, by his social siblings that it was an unforgettable experience, by his teachers that it would be a good next step, and by his advisors that it was the only option.
Before you stop reading, this isn’t some righteous indignation against college, some crusade against the system. College isn’t necessarily bad, in fact, often it can be very good. It did wonders to my brother, made them a productive member of society, somehow. This is a crusade against my own choices, my own moves, my own decisions. And they all started coming to a head when I was pushed into going to college. Back to the story.
Now, I wasn’t actually ready to go to college, and I knew it. I was still emotionally immature, I had no concept of how to talk with someone, and I felt more comfortable sitting alone in a room full of people than talking to someone that I liked talking to. It wasn’t like the workload would be difficult, just that I wouldn’t get what I needed at the time. I would skirt through and graduate learning about half of what I was taught and getting middling grades. I would be friendly with people in classes, and isolated outside of them, spending the spare hours working on school, sleeping, and goofing off.
But, neither of the two places which accepted me allowed for a differed acceptance, and so I ended up going to college right then. ON the surface, it wasn’t bad. Scratch that, on the surface, compared to what I had expected, it was great. Within two weeks, I’d found some people that I could talk to and confide in, and in a month or two, I also had friends. Like a whole bunch of friends. And that first year of college was, after the first couple of weeks, exactly what I’d been promised, at least by my brother.
As I expected, I skirted through my classes with middling grades, and ended up stumbling into signing up for a double major.
Like a proper story, however, there is some background necessary, so lets rewind time back another bit, to when I was in kindergarten, because that is as far back as I remember clearly. Since certainly that time, I’ve been interested in about three things. Primarily, I’ve been interested in understanding and knowing as much as I could. This sort of fascination with knowledge has led me down more Wikipedia deep dives than I wish to recount, and led me to have freakishly specific knowledge about seemingly random topics. The other two are related to the first somewhat, but more closely related to one another. I do not know which came first, but I have always had a fascination with stories, what makes them good and what makes them last, and I have always loved to fictionalize my own personal history. Note, this isn’t the same as lying, not really. I’ve also always loved to lie when it would get me out of work, but it went beyond that. For the essays about what I did over the summer, I’d write consistent fantastical tales of adventure, and I love looking back at them, because as the years past, they became more and more believably fantastic. I didn’t do this because I thought people would believe the story, but because I wanted to tell it, and that was the only medium I had at the time.
So, as I grew up, my intelligence pushed me towards doing math a lot. I couldn’t bother myself to actually do science, or write essays, or study what I was supposed to study, but math was easy enough to do without thinking. Then, in middle school, I began taking the lazy language, Latin, because it was the only one I wouldn’t be required to speak. But the textbook had a story to it, and so I read through it faster than the class went, and became pretty good at the language along the way. And then every summer, I’d write dumb little plots of stories, of games, of movies, even of weird series combining all three. My life was pulling me in three directions, and I was good at all of them. Latin had the ancient, enduring stories that I loved to read and dissect, and all we did once we’d reached the second year of high school was dissect the stories. Math was easy for me, came naturally, and required little work for a lot of information. And I was beginning to write more, even started an actual story in what little free time school, camps, family gatherings, and summer jobs allowed for. And so, indecisive as I am, I just went with what people told me and what my gut said.
Which brings us back to college, where I, feeling slightly burnt out on Math at the time, decided to take a bunch of courses about ancient stuff along with my Latin. Seemed fine at the time, I figured I’d pick back up on math the next semester, and be back on track for whatever on earth kind of majors I was thinking about back then. Coming out of that first semester, however, I was once again taking no math courses, and had become a major in both Latin and Ancient Greek, because I followed the good advice of a professor of mine, who gave the advice to someone that sounded confident in a decision about which they didn’t actually know their opinion. The one major problem with being a practiced liar is that it is hard to turn it off.
This brings us to my writing. You see, it turns out double majoring, with a bunch of minors too, leaves almost no free time for doing what writers ultimately need to do: write. And so, throughout the first two years of college, I did almost no writing. It didn’t help that the short story I finished and submitted to the school publication was rejected despite a friend of my parents who was once an actual editor for a real fiction magazine saying it was really well written, if a bit more curse filled than they would have been allowed to publish back in the day. And without writing anything for years, all those stories I had strong ideas about and all those plans to get things out there for public consumption went to the wayside. Again, nothing to do with the system and entirely due to my approach to it.
Then, after those two good years, there came a huge drop off in just about everything. My friends from my freshman year were almost all gone, and those who weren’t had went on to find other friends. Me, I just sat quietly in my corners of campus, and hid from society. For the first time in forever, I had time which I truly had only to myself and I loved it. I loved it so much that I gave up the whole hanging out with friends and having fun adventures ideas which were part of the reason I was pushed into going to college. I started actually doing all of my work, because I was enjoying it more, and I even started writing again. Not well and only for an hour at a time, mind you, but writing all the same. And my writing began to improve.
Then came the problem that I knew would come up from the beginning. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Everyone else knew, and so I went with their ideas for my future, as I always had, but I didn’t know. There isn’t any issue with this, at the surface, but remember, I don’t do work that I don’t want to do. Call it a character flaw, or emotional immaturity, or general immaturity, or laziness, it doesn’t matter. I personally call it all of those, and more harsh language at times, but I need to force myself to do work sometimes when I lose focus, and if I don’t want to achieve the result, I can never seem to force myself to do the work. I’d never had any difficulty forcing myself to do some forms of work, like writing stories or even most sorts of essays. These were things which I wanted to have finished. A finished essay meant a better understanding of whatever I was writing about, which I always wanted. A finished story meant something that I could theoretically put out there for people to read and provide feedback, helping me become a better writer, which was another thing I’d always wanted. The issue always came with projects which I saw little value in finishing. In high school, it was the science fair, because reading about experiments that were successful is far more informative than attempting to study something with no certainty of success. Fortunately, I never had to do this in college. In college, the flaw lay in the same general concept, though: Things that lacked the certainty of some form of success. It never really hurt me in the first couple of years, I could survive with C’s and still graduate. But then I began to be told that I’d want to go to graduate school, and suddenly those C’s mattered. What made matters worse, those C’s made the certainty of getting into any graduate school at all fall into question. Suddenly, applying to graduate schools had no purpose, in my warped mind. There was no benefit to being rejected, and a high likelihood of that happening. And so, coming into the winter of my senior year, I just couldn’t bring myself to finish the application processes on time. I never really knew whether or not I actually wanted to go to graduate school, and without warning, it was taken off the table completely. And remember that bit about being a practiced liar? Well, no one was actually aware that I hadn’t applied, because I didn’t want them to yell at me. Everyone would have been angry at me for throwing away what I had clearly wanted to do, and would ignore what I said to the contrary, so rather than deal with that, I simply told everyone that everything was going fine.
So, where did that leave me? At the end of it all, I am now well past twenty, have about half of the stories I want to write even started, in the middle of about twelve of them, and am not nearly as good at writing as I should be. I’ve hemorrhaged years of my life into going to college, and may very well not going to end up using my degree for anything. As I predicted, I skirted through my time here, with not nearly as many experiences as promised, learning about half of what I should have, maturing very little, and not at all improving my job prospects. And to top it all off, I lost the confidence in my writing that I had when going into college. My freshman year, I was nearly ready to send my stories, terrible as they were at the time, to anyone who might have a chance of publishing them. I sent them to strangers who I’d spoken to over the internet, even. And now, I feel nervous about sharing them with my closest of friends, despite how much better they are. So, to put it mildly, I screwed myself over.
The worst part, though, isn’t that I screwed myself. It isn’t even that I pushed into a life I wasn’t ready for. No, the worst part is that I did everything “right”. I made the choices I was supposed to make. I went to college. I found friends. I hung out. I did my work. I found a major I enjoyed. I tried my damnedest to learn as much as I could. And in the process, I ended up worse off than had I spent the last five years hiding in a cabin twiddling my thumbs. That’s the kicker. I am nowhere closer to knowing what I want to do with my life, much less actually doing it, and by every societal indication, I should be.
Finally, as I leave, I wish to reiterate: This is not me complaining about college in general. College is an important part of many people’s developments as human beings. This isn’t even really a complaint about the system that pushed me to go to college. I had many friends who were in the same system as I was who didn’t. This is ultimately about me. I followed when I really shouldn’t have, and that caused me to fail.
But it goes beyond simply me. I know many people who feel similar, who feel pushed into going to college when they didn’t feel ready, or felt pushed away from it when they felt it was the right next step. I hope I speak for all of them when I tell everyone reading this my true message. Listen to the people giving you advice, because they have been through things, but don’t discredit your own opinions. Your perspectives on yourself and your future are far more important than anything anyone else has to say about it. So, if you are uncertain, listen to others, whoever they might be. But if you know their advice won’t work for you, don’t follow it. Find another path for yourself, if everyone’s advice goes against what you know about yourself.