tavie.com

I should have been asleep half an hour ago (how many blog posts must I start like that??) but I can't let the day pass without, you know, some spew. A little spew. Don't have to bear with me. Go read something educational.

I just wanted to think about where I was several years ago versus where I am today. Not too many years ago ago I was in this room-- same room, sure, different bedsheets but same everything else-- and I had dropped out of a prestigious and demanding public high school. I was about fifty pounds heavier. I couldn't imagine a future for myself. When asked to describe where I saw myself in ten years, I would invariably reply, "In a mental institution" or "in a halfway house for emotionally retarded adults", and I would say these things with dull but deadly seriousness.

Then things happened, and we press the fast-forward button, and I meet some people online. And then I meet them offline. And they give me things to read and tell me that I'm smart and show me things about myself that I'd forgotten about, like that I used to enjoy school and be good at learning and like questions and thinking and accomplishing things.

And then we'll fast-forward again, and I still haven't gotten that fancy-school diploma, but I've got some decent SAT scores, and am on the road to a lovely, fake diploma from a school in Queens that I've only been to once (a fascinating tale for another time), and I am enrolling in the school my sister is attending. And I start to go there. And now the high-school dropout with no future is in college.

She's not the happiest she could be there, because her last serious schooling was in a prestige-obsessed factory that churns out Westinghouse Scholarship Winners, but damned if she didn't find something worthwhile there anyway. Damned if she didn't learn some more things. Damned if she didn't have the best friends in the world helping her along.

And damned if that high-school dropout with a future in a mental institution isn't sitting here, blogging after midnight on a work night, with that damned Bachelor's Degree under her belt now.

Fuck, yeah, I'm proud of myself. I was nowhere and I started going somewhere. It's damned hard to start and I done did it.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:10 AM | shower me with attention