Dropout

Two of the biggest regrets of my life are high school and college. As smart as I am, I regret having nothing to show for it in the world of academia. High school was fraught with the issues going on outside of school that led to four years of on again, off again depression and anxiety. To a degree it was out of my control, but college was supposed to be different.

College was to be the place where I would have my academic resurrection, but instead I think I confused getting over my issues with running away from my problems. I went to college when I absolutely should not have been there and yet there I was wasting away my potential one Perkins Loan at a time.

It wasn’t a total wash. I found my wife and, equally important, I found myself and pulled him back from the brink of despair. Dramatic interpretations aside, I really did get my shit together and my body caught up to that old soul that everyone talked about. Still, something was amiss and it only got worse when I dropped out.

Between 2000 and 2005 I think I dropped out and came back about three times before finally throwing in the towel. The reasons are irrelevant although some are noble and some are just made up excuses that I told myself to feel better. But in 2008 it came crashing down.

I rented the movie Revolver and it planted an idea that I just couldn’t shake. The movie presents the protagonist’s ego as an external character, one that lies and conspires in order to protect his investment (the self). The ego goes undetected because it is often mistaken to be inner dialogue or the conscious mind. As the main character, Jake, put it:

“You’ll always find a good opponent in the last place you’d ever look.”

At that point in time I had a secure job that afforded a very comfortable lifestyle and every single day I went to work with my head hanging because I was unfulfilled and stressed out. But every time the idea of going back to school crept in it was quickly dashed by this defiant idea that I was somehow taking the road less traveled and proving something by succeeding in spite of not having a degree.

This new idea that perhaps the voice that I’d been listening to all along wasn’t actually looking out for me, but trying to protect its investment made me question that decree. My subsequent research (Wikipedia) explained that the ego acts much like a sadistic overprotective parent. It shelters you from the truth often to your own detriment. But how could I be sure that it was ego and not just sound logic?

“Wherever you don’t want to go is where you will find him.”

I started exploring this idea by putting myself in situations that I’d normally avoid. Nothing life threatening. I don’t need an ego to tell me not to drink and drive or jump out into traffic. But I toyed with ideas and then tried to refute that sound logic. What’s so bad about going to school? So what if I choose to jump off this less traveled road? What I realized was that most, if not all, of those answers were rooted in the fear of humiliation or the fear of the unknown. It all boiled down to some derivative of insecurity, and here I was supposedly Mr. Self-Reliant who faced up to XYZ on his own and feared nothing. So what do I do?

“Use your perceived enemy to destroy your real enemy.”

I faced up to the thing that I “hated” most. I enrolled in school and when I found out that I’d basically have to start from scratch all hell broke loose. I was 26 then and there was no way in hell that I was gonna go through four more years of school when I was only one year away when I dropped out. I’d be 30 just getting a bachelor’s. All of my friends finished at 22 and some had their master’s by now. I recognized that to be ego right away, so I kept at it.

Over the last four years I’ve had heart surgery, my wife had a baby, my grandfather died and my grandmother had a heart attack. All of which are supposedly excellent reasons to leave school for a while, according to my advisor. If you throw in the whole “stay at home with the baby” thing, then I probably didn’t really have a chance in hell of finishing by 30.

But a funny thing happened about a week ago. I walked across a stage and three people shook my hand and gave me a diploma. Okay, that’s a lie. They handed me a diploma cover and inside was a letter that said, “Even though you have spent tens of thousands of dollars for this thing, we still haven’t figured out a way to at least give you an artist’s rendering of the actual degree. It’ll be in the mail sometime next month. First student loan bill to follow.”

I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. Now if only I could go back to high school.