I've been on the road for over a week now--hard to remember, since the first day of my trip was spent in a sleep-deprived daze. I had a two-layover red-eye that got me into BDL at 11 AM last Wednesday. I spent the weekend in Boston hanging out with Berklee students and a high school buddy who now works at a corporate consulting firm, alternately, for the most part. It got me thinking a lot about college.
I never finished college. Explaining why would be long, tedious, circular, and ultimately irrelevant. It isn't a decision I regret an iota. Recently, I have been considering going back to school next fall, largely because next fall I will be 24, and thus (hopefully) eligible for more reasonable student aid. But also because I have things I want to study: music theory, bookkeeping, philosophy, anthropology. I don't have a degree in mind, which was the one mistake I made that I do regret in my going to college the first time around; I just want to learn abundantly.
My attempts to understand this burgeoning desire for schooling has led to a lot of thinking back on previous iterations of myself, their dreams, habits, and ambitions. I landed upon a memory of me at age twelve, when I discovered Joseph Campbell. I was completely inspired by his year of hermitage, locked in a cabin with thousands of books. Such isolation now would be, not impossible, exactly, but hardly desirable. The world is a much faster-paced one than Campbell had to cope with. I haven't returned to that dream for almost a decade; I more or less lost it with the cynicism of the beginning of high school.
I had many things to overcome in the intervening years. I had to face my privilege and live outside it for a time, to reject my parents completely so that I could return knowing what I appreciated about what they had to offer. I had to dismiss the loathing I had been taught for my body and my gender, not just with panicked defensiveness but with steel-cold self-assuredness. I had to care for others so much that I lost myself entirely in order to find myself again completely: Myself, Me, not an extension of anyone else, not an anonymous face in a crowd.
Now I am perhaps ready to become a thinker of great thoughts.
