I began my freshman year in college the same way I’d spent many years in high school. I knew I was smart, I knew I was competent, and I knew how to get a decent grade. I spent the first two years of my time in university as a resident of the Dean’s List each semester. My grades were high enough to garner me an academic scholarship. When I transferred schools just before my junior year, it was with the hope of being more academically challenged, and I fully believed I would succeed.
And then, as it so often does, life happened. A series of traumatic events completely derailed everything. It wasn’t easy for me to talk about, and in fact, very few people knew what I was going through, but because of this huge change in my life, I was a wreck. I had always suffered from depression, but at mostly manageable levels. The chaos triggered a major depressive episode, one that almost incapacitated me. I started skipping class, too heartbroken to get out of bed. I called in sick to work. I told myself I would be able to catch up, but as time wound on, my encouragements seemed even more fragile. How could I go to class, write this paper, and do well at my job if everything around me felt destroyed?
Eventually, I faced a reckoning. Out of my full course load, I failed almost every class. I sat in meetings with the dean, the one whose academic achievements board I was used to being on. I worried about losing my academic scholarship, the one that made me going to school possible. I disappointed many of my professors, who either didn’t know me well enough to realize this wasn’t normal for me, or who saw a potential in me I was never going to reach.
Failing a few college courses might not seem like that big of a deal, but it was enough to thwart my entire future. I had fought so hard to get into college, coming from an unconventional educational background of being home-schooled until age fourteen, at which point I had to fight my way into higher level classes in public school. I had to struggle for the funding to go to college, with every adult in my life telling me that university just wasn’t attainable for someone as poor as I was. After so many years of trying so hard and, at times, being my only advocate, I didn’t just fail my classes. I felt I had failed myself, and every person who believed in me along the way.
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