The big yellow buses are back in our neighborhood and with them the reminder that I need to work on going back to school myself. It’s been a goal since the day I dropped out twenty-two years ago, pregnant and talked into marrying a man who didn’t love me by a mother who did and thought it was the right thing to do. (He left us after a year and half and we’ve stayed good friends throughout the years.)
I was a literature major at the time. In my book, that was code for either intellectual snob or slacker. I was the latter in college. I really wanted to major in communication arts but when I found out you needed to take an exam first to see if you made the cut, I chickened out and… settled. Or so I thought.
I didn’t realize at the time that literature was a much more cerebral pursuit that made my brain hurt. What kind of job would I have landed had I actually stayed in school and graduated with a degree in literature? I don’t know. Professor perhaps? High school English teacher? Journalist? Novelist? Poet? I wonder.
And while I didn’t set foot in any of the communication arts classes, I serendipitously landed in radio and stayed there until I was creatively spent hosting, producing, and directing a morning show on the FM band.
Twenty-two years after I walked off campus with my pregnant belly, no amount of validation from a relatively successful career in communications can persuade me that having a college degree is unnecessary. Will it define my success? Absolutely not. At 41, it’s simply something I want to do, I need to do for me. I now willingly lay down on the altar of nerdiness, hoping that my years of pouring out knowledge and experience will be replenished. At this stage in my life — and with Learner my number one strength — I have fallen in love with learning. I am a late blooming nerd.
I think I always was one but I got caught up in the notion that cutting class and singing in a heavy metal band was cooler than learning about Thomas Hardy and F. Sionil Jose.
The funny thing though is that I’m debating with myself on what I want to be when I grow up. I know, right. Twenty-two years later and I still haven’t made up my mind. Do I go the practical route and major in something totally not in my league like business and marketing? Or do I turn up the web volume and move from content creator to web designer or programmer? Or do I pursue what truly makes me happy — words and the art of stringing them together?
What I know for sure is that this time, I don’t want to settle.
