I didn’t get the best education. My college wasn’t the greatest, but even there I could have gotten a better education if I’d really wanted it. I didn’t try very hard because I’d never had to, and I didn’t have any real end goals to try for anyway, and so I just slid by. My grades were good enough to keep my scholarships, but I didn’t learn much of anything.

I didn’t realize how uneducated I was until much later when I left the comfortable hell of the food service industry and myself in a working world populated by truly educated people. Over the years, I’ve made friends with people that are truly educated. They speak multiple languages, they can talk about art and mathematics with authority. It’s humbling. 

So I’ve decided to go back to school.

——-

I have a job that most people would kill me for, a perfect family, and all of the other things that a college degree is supposed to buy for you, so why bother?

Because I can do more. 

A couple of years ago, I sought some therapy. I was unhappy, and I didn’t understand why or what to do about it. At first I thought it was because I’d always been unhappy, that it was just another personality trait of mine, but my unhappiness was poisonous to my new family, and I needed to deal with it if I was ever going to be a good father and husband, so I sought help.

Therapy taught me that there was a disconnect between who I was and who I thought I was supposed to be, and I could never be happy until I reconciled those two people. The liberty that came with the realization that I could leave behind the idea of who I was supposed to be and define myself by who I was, a financially successful man with a family that I loved, allowed me to be truly and desperately happy for the first time in my life. You have no idea how good it felt to learn that, if I wanted to, I could leave behind all of the aspirations in my life that never materialized, but continued to hang around my neck like an albatross.

At the end of my final session with the therapist, he shook my hand and said, “You’re not finished becoming you.” 

“I’m not finished” has become my personal mantra.

——-

A few weeks ago, I looked into a program at the University of Texas that has always interested me. It’s an interdisciplinary graduate program that plays to pretty much all of my interests, but I’m not ready for it. Even if I could get into it (no sure thing), my time there would be wasted without a better grounding in the basics.

So I’m starting over. First at community college, and hopefully at UT after that.

The prospect of another decade or so in school is daunting when I think about it. I suspect I’ll be in my mid-forties before I complete the course of study, and who knows what career prospects will be there for me, but it doesn’t matter. The purpose is bigger than the goal anyway.