Always carry an emergency jet pack

You know how sometimes you're driving along in your imaginary convertible, with the top down, your hair wrapped in a billowy silk scarf, eyes tucked safely behind gigantic sunglasses, when all of a sudden, a bunny wanders into the road, and you slam on the breaks, only to go into a massive skid and your convertible plummets off the side of a cliff and bursts into flames?

I have two current bunnies. One being my newly acquired shoulder injury. Hooray! I'm thinking it's either a fresh case of tendonitis, bursitis, or even maybe a minor rotator cuff tear. Whatever it is, I stink to high heaven of Icy Hot and have blown through a small bottle of Motrin. It's possible this may require a visit to Herr Doktor, but for now, I'm just going to see what I can do myself. This clearly throws all exercise out the window until it heals, which we all know it my favorite thing ever.

Second bunny is my ever-mounting disappointment with my school, as a whole. The last straw for me this week was the very poor handling of a clear Title IX violation that involved my friend from the LGBTQ group on campus. She followed all of the necessary steps and was told she was being overly sensitive. I can't keep giving my money to  a school like this, especially when I have options. My studies have been put on pause until I can research the process of transferring back to Kent State.  

Lucky for me, I never go for drives in my imaginary convertible without my emergency jet pack, so I'm going to be fine. I'll be feeling the inertia that comes with two brakes being thrown on at 60 mph, but a week or so of readjusting and I'll be back in my stride. 

Broccoli is responsible for my weight gain

I had to write a paper on runaway slaves for history. I felt like I did a fairly good job, considering that I am a writer, but the grade came back today as a 72%. I don't feel it was a low-C caliber paper, so I went to read comments from my professor to see what went so wrong. Well. There weren't any comments. Yes, I got a nearly failing grade and my professor didn't feel like it was necessary to tell me why. I fired off a polite email requesting the information, but in the interim, I've had a lot of time to think about this.

I'm really angry about my classes. That is to say, I'm really pissed off that I'm currently a student. That may be a dumb thing to be mad about, considering I got myself in this predicament, but I think what makes me most angry is that I'm angry at all.When I quit college the first time around, I did so because I was sick of the bullshit of college bureaucracy. I just wanted to build my family and get on with life, and every week that passed was a giant blinking sign that I was just wasting my time.

So I quit.

Now that I'm back to school for the second time, I've made it three semesters and I'm back to feeling the same way. Kyle and I have spent the day talking about it and agreed that going back to school, has really messed up our family. I went back to college to continue educating myself, but I realized over the summer that the education I was getting wasn't worth the effort I was putting into it. I hoped that having a normal 16 week semester, with a reduced course load would help ease some of the tension my studies were putting on me and the family, but I'm sitting here, nearly at the halfway point, and all I can feel is an increasing resentment.

I'm very unhappy with college. I started off great, but after that first semester, everything has just rocketed downhill. I'm not learning anything, and what used to be an eager anticipation to complete assignments has become a daily root canal. It's not the workload or subject matter that's putting the stress on my shoulders, it's once again the bureaucratic bullshit. It's professors who will dish out 72% grades without taking the time to explain why such a huge chunk of points have been docked. I did it wrong? Okay, tell me what I did wrong!

I think it's fair to assume that the problem is that I don't have the right mentality for college. I don't view this as an extension of high school. I don't believe that professors have some almighty power. On the contrary, I've been in the outside world enough to know that this is a business transaction. I am paying the school to pay the instructors to teach me what I want to know. The fact that I come out of these classes feeling dumber than I went in is a sure sign I'm not getting what I am paying for. I'm not after some stupid piece of paper that says I can get a job now. I'm looking for actual knowledge, for the sake of knowledge. The only thing I've gained since returning to college is 20 pounds. Not exactly the sort of accomplishment I was going for.

But I'm not going to quit.

Kyle made a great analogy tonight that sums up who I am. I'm a taste-tester. I like to take little bites of everything so that I have the experience of knowing what everything tastes like. If I don't like the first few bites, I don't waste time eating the rest of the plate. There are quite a few people who believe you should eat the whole thing, and that's great for them. I'd rather move on to another dish in hopes that I'll maybe find something worth eating.

College, for me, is like a plate of broccoli. It tastes awful, especially the longer I'm eating it, but the reality is that it's full of nutrition that my body needs. My first plan of attack was to hurry, cram as much as I could into my mouth, chew, and swallow, to be done with it as fast as possible. When I found more broccoli hidden behind another broccoli, I accepted that I might need to take smaller bites, and maybe mix them in with some mashed potatoes.

I'm flexible enough to understand now that, if I'm to finish college, I'm going to need to take even smaller bites, and bury it in a giant pile of cheese so that I don't even really notice it's there. I'm backing it down to one class per semester starting in the spring. This is a huge departure from my original plan, but I can't stress enough that, if I don't drastically change something, there's no way I'm going to graduate. I'm so blinkin' miserable, and I miss my family and friends, and I miss reading books for fun, and watching movies! I miss going to sleep without writing papers or doing math problems in my head all night. I miss living my life, and I want to stop torturing myself with all the damn broccoli! 

Narrow it down

What’s nice about difficult times is that they often come with a lesson. This semester has been a doozy, to put it mildly, and the lesson it taught me was to be clear on what I want. I started out my second college career with huge ambitions, and I worried that I may have been biting off more than I could chew. With two completed semesters behind me now, I can say with certainty that I could chew the workload just fine, it just tasted terrible. I’m a hard-working, diligent student and I believe my grades reflect that.

The school agrees with me considering a few weeks ago, I was accepted into the Honors Program that they introduced last spring. It came with a hefty scholarship, and in return, I was expected to take 13 credit hours of honors courses. The problem came when I sat down with the advisor to schedule those honors courses. “The program is so new,” he explained, “that we don’t have many classes available yet. The only English Composition honors class we have, you’ve already taken, and there’s only one 3-credit Psychology class available for you to take, but we should be adding more for future semesters.” I signed up for that solitary class and left feeling like a rock was stuck in my shoe. 

The other aspect of the honors program that was clarified by the advisor was that I would be assigned a mentor according to my major, but as there are no Composition honors classes, there are no composition honors mentors. I would instead be paired with the Psychology mentor. It just happens that the psychology class I’ve taken this summer is taught by the head of the department and, you guessed it, my mentor. 

We’re going to call this professor Dr. Doctor because he is working on his second doctorate. I have been assured by everyone I meet that he is a brilliant man, with a great heart and a stellar mind, but sadly, I never got to see that aspect of him. Dr. Doctor and I got off on the wrong foot, at least from my perspective. It’s not that he did anything wrong, necessarily, but we have a clash of personalities. I am a direct “Yes or no” kind of person, concerned with efficiency and clear communication, while Dr. Doctor is more of the “Sage on the mountain” type of person, giving cryptic advice and encouraging students to use their best judgement. I struggled all semester to get any clear answers or real help from him. My final paper had to be written twice because the instructions were two pages long and meandered pendulously from point to point. I did it “wrong” the first time. Let me be clear, I knew it was “wrong” and the assignment made no sense to me, but I believed I was handing in what he asked for, with all its wrongness. He read my first draft and all I could gather out of his critique was that I had done it wrong, and it should have been like a standard paper. Well, shit! I can write standard papers! So, the second time around, I wrote it like I knew papers should be written in the first place. I got an A. In fact, I finished the class with over 100%, despite feeling like it was a complete waste of my time.

The idea of having Dr. Doctor as my mentor slowly became a rock in my other shoe, and I was developing an uncomfortable limp. As I shifted my thoughts from the summer semester to the fall, I sat down to really think about where I was going to go from here and whether or not it was worth making the trip with this limp. The lesson from the difficult semester came to me then: “Nicole, what do you want?” 

I started working this out with some retrospection. I went back to school because I wanted to continue educating myself. In that regard, I have been successful. I wanted to get involved with college life to experience what I missed the first time around. By joining the LGBT group and subsequently falling into an officer role, I have been successful. I wanted to take classes to better my writing. As the only writing classes I have taken so far were Composition 1 (because my ACT scores expired a long time ago and my test-out was no longer valid from 1998) and Business Writing (which isn’t real writing, if you ask me), I have not been successful. Memos and dossiers and proposals? My brain was numb, not engaged. 

Finally, I wanted to major in Psychology because the subject is fascinating to me. I passed the basic Psychology course many years ago, so I didn’t need to take it again. Instead, what I was left with were specialized courses. As I thought about this further, the ache in my heel indicated that I was finally getting to the root of the issue. I sat down with my schedule, my notes, my graduation requirements, and the list of classes to hash this out once and for all. What I realized was that, save for one Abnormal Psychology class, I wasn’t interested in the specialized classes I needed to take for my major. From there the answer was clear: I need to drop the Psychology major. I went into it with high hopes, but I can see now that I am wasting my time, money, and energy. I reconfigured what my future would look like without Psychology and discovered that, by focusing on English Composition alone, I will be graduating in the spring. 

Ah, but remember the Honors Program? There are no classes for my Composition major, but if there were, with graduation happening in two semesters, there really isn’t enough time to meet the 13 credit hour requirement. Running everything through the “What do I want?” filter again, I understood that being in the Honors Program wasn’t really going to benefit me at all. Sure, it comes with a scholarship, but what good is a scholarship if it means you’ll be going to school longer just to get your degree? I would actually save more money by graduating quickly than by allowing the scholarship to be a buffer against tuition. Furthermore, while I will fully admit that I was excited about joining a slew of honors clubs, I realize joining them all would just be a waste of my time. Without the Psychology major, I cannot join their honor society, Psi Beta. But I can still join Phi Theta Kappa, which is the National Honor Society. A week ago, I had three honors groups available to me, but I’m sure one will be plenty. 

I came to college to open doors, but here I am preparing to close some really big ones. Dropping a major and saying no to the Honors Program seems like a really bad idea, academically. What about me, personally? What do I want? I want to creatively write, and I realize that by closing these doors, I will be able to redirect my resources back to what will nurture that. I can focus on classes I will enjoy, or will at least help me reach my higher goals. I can more quickly graduate to either move on to another school to seek the next degree, or I can just put my degree in a nice frame and hang it on the wall beside my other awards and accomplishments, to think about warmly when I dust it from time to time. 

This has been my take-away from this semester. I can be, and should be, selective. If I’m miserable, walk away. If I’m not being fulfilled, stop putting energy into it. If the “benefits” are really a ball and chain around my ankle, get out. I do not have to do anything that brings me unnecessary stress or work when I have my goals clearly defined. This means being clear about what I want for myself and the path I want to take to get there. I’m a hard-working and intelligent woman—I have more than proven this—and it takes wisdom to locate what truly serves me. The past few months, I have put too many things in the way of my progress and it’s time to start letting go.