2003-04-18 - 11:39 p.m.
I woke up in a cold sweat with the covers in a knot around my neck. Thank god... it was just a dream. Or should I say nightmare..... I had one of my recurring nightmares last night. This one takes on different circumstances, but the situation is always the same: I suddenly "remember" that I am enrolled in classes and it is end of the semester and all my projects are due (or I have a final exam) and I haven't been to class all semester. Last night I thought I was enrolled in a drawing class and and a design class (with the professor from whom I actually took design who taught me so much and demanded so much) and an English class for which I had to write a paper. I had to do everything, my entire semester's work, this weekend or fail my classes. I awoke in a panic.
I know why this is a recurring nightmare: it actually happened to me.
I started college at the age of seventeen with a scholarship I didn't think I deserved and a hunger to experience something of life outside the restrictive confines of my family and small town high school. Even though my parents insisted that I live at home and commute to the nearby state college, it still seemed like an exciting experience. I took courses in the summer after high school, blending in with the smaller summer school crowd, and did quite well. But my life was changing so fast. I met Diana, a fellow art major, in my first college art class. We found ourselves allies in a class full of elementary ed majors and started taking breaks together. She was, simply, everything I wanted to be: older, beautiful, skinny, rich, cool. She started introducing me to her friends-- the hip, artsy, theatre crowd-- and inviting me to parties. In that first summer I had my first experiences with drinking, smoking, sex and pot, but my thrill wasn't about any of those things. The thing I was so absolutely high on was the acceptance I felt among all these crazy, creative types. In my small town high school, being a slightly off-beat individual had kept me always on the fringes of the cheerleader/team player "in" crowd. Everything in my high school social experience had convinced me that I didn't quite cut it. But now here were the coolest people I'd ever met, and they seemed so accepting, even welcoming to me. Being weird was practically a point of honor. I had my first all night philosophical discussions about the meaning of life, my first political actions (anti-war protests), my first parties where people did things like played guitars and read poetry. And if I wanted to sit in a corner and draw, that was fine, that was cool....
When the fall term began, my peers (the shiny new freshmen) flocked to campus, and suddenly I was in huge classes full of students not unlike my high school mates. I felt both intimidated and contemptuous, and even more devoted to setting myself apart and hanging around with my groovy older friends. But most of them had different kinds of lives: a few classes, part-time jobs, apartments of their own. And I was supposed to be attending a full slate of freshman general ed courses and then driving home to the farm in time to help with supper. I managed it for a few weeks but soon I driving in to town every day and spending most of my day drinking coffee in the student union, which was the central congregating point for all the cool people. I still carried books around with me, and everyone, including me, thought I was just about to go to class or just coming from class. Every day I thought of some excuse not to go.... I couldn't find a place to park and didn't want to walk in late.... the jock girls in my PE class roughed me up.... I couldn't stay awake in my 7:30 am class....I had Psychology with a girl from my high school I hated, etc. After a while the idea of going to class was frightening to me because I had missed so much I wouldn't know what was going on. So I just gave up and faked it until I suddenly moved away from home and then I didn't have to any more.... for a while.
After a lot of family trauma (which is another long story) I moved back home briefly, promised to be a good girl, and enrolled in spring semester classes. And essentially the very same thing happened. I started out going to class with a clean slate and high expectations, but I did not have the wherewithall to isolate myself and study when so much life was happening around me to me. Those were the days of "turn on, tune in and drop out" and the radical types among my friends were questioning the "relevance" of college and wanting to restore education to "the people." It was easy enough to believe all this stuff, to use it as an excuse for my own failures. After the second failed semester, I gladly gave up on school and before the next year began, I was married and expecting a baby.
I took a couple of classes when my baby was young and did OK (B's in both) but we didn't have the money for me to continue when my husband became a full time student again.
When I got a divorce two years later, I wanted to try school again. I couldn't get financial aid and so talked my family into paying a semester's tuition, but I was still trying to work, take care of a two-year-old in a tiny, drab two room apartment, and.... study. At least this time I managed to drop all my classes when I quit attending instead of taking all F's, but my guilt and sense of failure ran every bit as deep.
It was another five years before I tried going back to school. Meanwhile I had almost convinced myself that I couldn't stick with anything..... but I wanted to try one more time. I was so afraid I would do it again, and not at all sure I was in control. Life still wasn't easy: I had a seven-year-old kid, no money, and a stressful relationship. But I HAD changed. I graduated with honors after three and a half years of making straight A's.
It is a terrible feeling to watch your life spiraling out of control, of trying to hide your own destructive actions from yourself as well as everyone else. I imagine it must feel something like that to be an addict. To know, without a doubt, what you should be doing, but to be unable to make yourself do it. The guilt I felt over blowing off classes has lodged in my consciousness all these years.
In a way, that whole experience has helped me to be more compassionate to the students I talk to. I like to be able to say, "Forget about the bad grades. What do you feel ready to do NOW?" One of the reasons I am not too embarrassed to write about this is that I know from working with student records that a similar thing has happened to thousands of other people. I've come to see it with quite a bit of understanding. Sometimes people just simply are not in a place in their lives where they can devote themselves to school. And it is just too damn much work to do when you are distracted and want to be doing something else. It is an unfortunate thing about our educational system that all the advantages go to students who follow the traditional path and go to college right out of high school, because so many people are at their most receptive a few years later.
But....sometimes I think that in overcoming my tendency to hide from difficulties, I have become a little too controlled. I salvaged my life by learning to have self-discipline, to stay in control, and now sometimes I am frustrated or frightened by things I can't control. I try to balance the side of myself that needs to handle everything perfectly, to know what to expect, with the other side-- the artist-- who needs to be able to let go and plummet into the unknown and unforseen in order to be creative. It is an internal tug-of-war that ebbs and flows through my life, still popping up in my nightmares from time to time as a metaphor for anxiety.
Maybe I am just reliving all this school trauma because I am watching Piper trying to finish up her last semester, and feeling stress along with her as she struggles to get through the last few weeks. This has become the focus of our lives for now. There is nothing I can do to help, besides taking over the housework, and trying to be encouraging. We are both living a pressured life at the moment, just waiting for the final act of the six year drama know as the master's degree. And we are both so ready to throw our hats into the air and move on to another phase of life.
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