Thursday, September 27, 2007
How I got to here - Part 1
The ball I am currently rolling was set in motion thirteen years ago, when I was a 17 years old malcontent trudging my way through what I perceived to be meaninglessness. At the time, my life was circled around a triumvirate of impotence: anger, insecurity, and fear. I was deeply depressed and detached, my reality more about cessation than potentiality. Suicide was on my mind a great deal of the time, but fear kept any plans I might have had at bay(probably the only time cowardice has worked for me, in the long-term). Instead of killing myself, I started doing my best to kill my options.
If I had to point to a singular, specific event to serve as a summary for where my head was at during that time, I think the day I took my SATs would be the most suitable. I went into the test with absolutely zero interest in succeeding. No preparation, no motivation, and ultimately, no direction. Going to college was not on my list of priorities, and getting into a ‘good’ school meant nothing in my increasingly cloudy thinking. For the first hour or so, I worked studiously through the reading sections. Reading comprehension was always one of my strong points, so I was able to put the car in cruise and breeze my way through the seemingly endless stream of questions. All was going reasonably well, though trouble was on the horizon; I was beginning to get bored.
If I remember correctly, my mind wandered to the point that I started drawing on my scrap paper. This didn’t bode well, since the math section was just ahead and my waning interest, combined with a quiet penchant for self-destructive melodrama, was opening a door for disaster. What happened next seems as pathetic as it does inevitable in hindsight.
I remember having a short break before the math section began. During this break, I recall a feeling of generalized annoyance growing more and more pervasive within me. Looking back, the malaise which I allowed to consume me was already well on its way to derailing my immediate future, so what I did next was no great surprise. When I sat down, calculator and pencil at the ready, I started working through the problems, dragging my way through the first 20 or 30 questions before reaching a tipping point. With total indifference, I began arbitrarily filling in answer bubbles in order of their appearance on the answer sheet, which is to say I began Christmas treeing the math section. What would have taken a couple of hours took me a matter of minutes. I remember being quite satisfied with myself at the time.
With not much else to do, and plenty of time to waste, I did a drawing or two, and waited impatiently for time to be called. I wasn’t driving at the time, so leaving was impossible, which meant that I had to wait for time to expire before I could expect my ride to arrive. Looking back, I can’t believe it never occurred to me that I could be tossing away the next few years of my life, or that I could have picked up my pencil, started erasing, and saved my test score. Nope, I sat there, bored out of my mind, smiling inside at having quietly, passive-aggressively told ‘the Man’ to take his test and shove it up his ass. If I had only known then that the only thing being shoved up anyone’s ass was my head, the day would have certainly gone differently.
I ended up getting a 1070 on the test. Had I been a star athlete or an academic superstar (my GPA was something like 3.5, at the time), that probably would have been enough to get me into one of the larger state schools. As my will would have it, I was not particularly interested in attending any of the state schools, but my self-defeatism had already dismissed any possibility of attending the private, Liberal Arts schools I was truly interested in. The only school I applied to was the University of Florida, who rejected my application for admittance. In all honesty, that’s exactly what I wanted to happen.
The rejection letter landed in the trash before I had finished reading the first paragraph. It was a form letter, so there wasn’t much point in reading any further. The only option I could see was enrolling at St Petersburg Junior College (now St Petersburg College), so I filled out the forms and embarked on a series of gen ed courses which began a listless journey through 3 years of on and off attendance. Along the way, I sacrificed a Florida Academic Scholars scholarship on my altar of disillusionment. In a way, I suppose I was emo before emo was emo and I was determined to make sure I suffered long-term because of it. Ah, those heady days of youth and optimism. :)
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