Two years ago this month, I started my first year of a four year degree program in business at a college that is starting to merge into university-level education. It was a really strange time in my life, I was out of my "gratitude" phase of early sobriety and feeling pretty entitled. I was in an uncomfortable limbo of confusion and dissatisfaction, but mostly, fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of growing old on the sales floor, of having such an active job moving later into life. It was completely irrational, but, I am trusting that today, things have been sorted out, and I am where I need to be.
It was a tough go, exhausting and difficult, but I learnt a lot, especially things that weren't even on the syllabus. My confidence grew, and while my life was out of balance on the outside, on the inside I felt like I was finding my voice. I only stayed for year one, and then I went back to work in an office full-time. It's been a difficult transition the past year into the nine-to-five lifestyle, but the stability is doing me really well. I have spent the past year though romanticizing about going back to school, and my program has always been open to me. This semester I was going to take three courses, which is considered full-time. Classes start this week, a bit later than usual due to a teachers' strike that happened last semester, but as I went through the course material online, I became anxious and upset. I felt the resentments growing.
There are things that the professors get away with that they shouldn't. One sent a video of a lecture where a student's phone rings, and the professor went to the student, took his phone, and then smashed it on the floor. In his email he wrote something supposedly clever about how this is the cell phone policy. Another professor is sick and won't be in class this week, which means we lose that time and next week we'll have to cover three chapters in one lecture. The other class I dropped before I even became discouraged by the other profs, and it was the syllabus that was the problem. The work load was excessive, and while it would have been incredibly educational, it was only an elective and I am furthermore not spending my semester doing what was being asked of me, not at this point in my life, not at being on average twice the age of the other students.
I want to remember this, because, this is it. It has been two years since I have been in that unforgettable semester, and I know now I can't get that experience back. Even though my classes this semester were all in the buildings that I liked the most, I wanted to take them for me and for what I could take back to the office with me. Not wake up at six am two or three times a week to deal with shitty or asshole professors, or unreasonable work loads.
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