Mum got me excited for school. For weeks she told me I was going, what it would be like, that I would make friends and have fun learning things. It was intimidating - my memories are vague, but I was scared of the nun teaching the Reception class.
The next morning Mum woke me with, 'Time for school!' and I told her, authoritively, that I had already been.
She likes telling that story.
If you'd like an overblown and excessively dramatic description of how I fell out of university, you can read one here, but all you really need to know is that I intended to stay a bit longer. I was shellshocked. That worry you have when you're on the bus on the way to school and you realise you haven't done your homework and there's no way you can get it done in time and that particular teacher has already heard all your best excuses? That stomach-clenching panic and worry about what will happen? Yeah.
Dropping out of university was pretty much the adult, irreversible, absolute version of that feeling.
This evening I start a class at NYU.
Once upon a time this would have evoked a 'made a mistake and making good on it' post, with tones of moving on, making progress, righting wrongs and describing the level of emotional satisfaction and determination that a new opportunity presents.
Once.
I don't feel that way, though. Now, this is just a thing I'm doing.
It's a thing I have this evening, as in 'No, I can't, I have a thing.'
I want to pay attention and learn, but it's not a huge epiphanic event with resonances down the timeline of my life, resolving plotlines and themes.
It's just a thing.
Which is good, right? I must be moving on and making progress.
All good mate, all good.
I dropped out of Uni, haven't regretted it one bit.
yeah, once all the self-pressures and wafty vague background largenesses die away under the searchlight glare of being forced to make your own way through everyday life, it all gets a lot simpler and easier, doesn't it. and you look back and chew your lip a bit about how things might have turned out if you only knew this earlier.
but... it's also a bit greyer. without all those castles in the air calling as much as they were commanding.
btw, thanks for linking that post. that's the one i always think of when i hit your blog, as it's the first time i came across you, via the dear departed blorgy.
but the specific post kinda drifted away into the florescent expURLosion of the internet past and i always kinda meant to dig it up and record it but never quite enough to actually do it.
and now i've got it.
many thanks.
Nothing you want to do and choose to do is ever bad.
Good luck.
Apart from maybe murder.
...or picking your toenails and then sniffing your fingers...