College Experience Turns into Life

By Belle

In the year 2000 when I graduated from high school, I was just as naïve as any other typical 18 year old.  I had gone through grade school successfully.  My experience of education was overwhelmingly positive.

My father ambitiously and supportively told me that I could choose any college that I wanted to attend, no restrictions.  I had my sights set on small, private liberal arts colleges.  My interests were literature and psychology.  I also ambitiously wanted to learn the history of the world, something I felt a strong humanities background would support.  Perhaps this was a first sign of how I was overly ambitious.

I took full advantage of my father’s support about college and decided to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a small liberal arts college with extra heaps of liberal values on top.  Academically Reed is conservative though, with a mandatory Freshman Humanities course on ancient literature.  I had to read the Iliad in August before I started school.  All of that sounded like exactly what I wanted at that time.  However, I did not take into account the heavy and stressful financial burden and distance.

In retrospect, I was not prepared emotionally at the age of 18 to live on my own at a college across the country.  Because of my lack of maturity at that age, I struggled with class work for the first time in my life.  Still, I made it through my first two semesters of college with passable grades.  But the stress of feeling isolated at the young age of 18 and 19 years old continued to take its toll even once I returned to Maryland for the summer after my freshman year at Reed.  I suffered a severe health problem in late August and was not able to return to school at all for what would have been my Sophomore year.  Because I had always done well in school so easily until college, I think my family and friends and I were shocked that I had suddenly come across such a huge obstacle in my life.

After my severe health problem presented itself in Fall 2001 (which wasn’t a good time for anyone in the United States), the rest of my undergraduate career proved an uphill battle psychologically.  I barely was able to complete two more semesters at Reed.  In the Fall of what would have been my junior year of college, I made the decision to drop out at the beginning of the semester because I was not going to class and I was on my way to flunking out of school if I didn’t drop out.  When I called my Dad from Portland, OR to tell him I had just decided to drop out of school, he wasn’t angry.  He knew I was struggling and he was relieved I would be coming home to Maryland.

Back in Maryland it would take the entire course of my early and mid twenties to gain the maturity that I needed to succeed in school, and in life at all.  I worked full-time temp jobs off and on for a while.  Personally, I continued to feel very lost.  Spring 2004 came and went, and I watched all of my friends graduate from college as I had been expecting to at that time.  Finally, in Fall 2004, a good friend persuaded me to apply as a transfer student to the University of Maryland at College Park to finish my BA degree.

I was admitted as a student to College Park and went back to school full-time.  I decided to major in Literature because I enjoyed it and academically it was a strength for me.  I was able to get A’s in my three English courses my first semester at UMD (although I still received a C in an intro to architecture course).  I would love to say that life suddenly became easier once I started going back to school at UMD, but it didn’t.  I had a horrible roommate.  I made zero friends at the school and continued to be isolated as a transfer student.  At this point I was overweight, and I trudged around the large campus.  Some evenings I would trudge up a steep hill from my room to the cafeteria to eat a plate of nachos alone.  I went home to my parents’ house an hour away each weekend.

Somehow graduating from college and beginning life as an adult had become a much larger goal than I thought it was going to be when I started out in 2000.  I had not known that life would become such a personal struggle in my twenties.

Unfortunately, I eventually turned to online dating when my loneliness and lack of friends got the better of me.  I went on many first dates and had several month long “relationships” with young men who weren’t bad, but weren’t too great either.  Dating guys you are not very interested in is not a remedy for loneliness at all actually.  I learned you only feel less isolated if you enjoy the company of the people you are with.  The naïve and innocent young woman who graduated from high school with a studious attitude and a strong feeling of what was right and proper had disappeared.  In her place was a person I did not recognize well.

Life in my early and mid twenties was really tough.  I made myself keep trudging forward, but I wasn’t doing well.  I had no evidence that things would get any better, and a dreary sort of resignation set in.

My last semester at UMD, I shared an off-campus apartment with my younger sister, who had also become a UMD student.  One evening as I watched some music videos online at the kitchen table, I was inspired to write a song for the first time in my life.  The song was pretty decent, with about six to eight descriptive stanzas.  It was basically about my struggle in life, in kind of a more eloquent way.

I immediately seized on the idea of myself as a musician and songwriter as a lifeline.  Finally I had some type of talent to take with me out in the world to make myself sparkle a bit, if only in my own mind for my own confidence.  I had taken years of piano lessons and could also play a bit on the cello.  I quickly marketed myself on the musician section of craigslist.  I got a lot of fun emails about different bands in the DC and Maryland area.  As my inbox was flooded with upbeat and interesting possible music ventures, I felt a surge of popularity that I had not known in years.  This was very important at that time for my fragile self-confidence.

I joined a local band as a keyboard player for about a year, as I finally graduated from college in December 2006.  I had achieved my BA degree in literature.  The band was a little bit fun, and a lot weird because the other band members were men in their thirties.  In December 2008 I wrote an email to join a new band with people my own age.  When we met and practiced for the first time in January 2009, the four of us got along well.  There was Adam, the sensitive hipster with a great solo guitar style.  There was the founder of the band, David, who was quiet but scarily witty.  And, there was Joey, who would become my future husband.  I had never met anyone remotely like Joey before.  He impressed me with both his intelligence and humility.  He played guitar really well, and he also wrote and drew.  Besides all of his intelligence and talent, he sought the same values in life as me.  I had never met anyone as kind and thoughtful as Joey before.  Our friendship, and then relationship, and then marriage, was the most effortless and wonderful thing in the world.  All of a sudden, after nearly 10 years of hardships and turmoil, my life became really beautiful and just plain fun.  Joey made me laugh loudly and laugh harder than I ever had before (though not an attractive sight since I start wheezing).  He was completely supportive of my current lack of direction because he believed in me to sort it out eventually.  What started out as lessons to learn in four years time became lessons it will take a lifetime to learn.

And now I am pursuing my second BA, this time in psychology.  I would enjoy being a talk therapist in a few years, after I get a Masters too.  My life is calm and enjoyable, so I am able to focus on getting good grades again, in a subject I really find fascinating.

Life is everything, from the horrible to the wonderful, and it can turn around so quickly.  It is worth fighting for years to eventually be able to live a life that is enjoyable and wonderful.  I wasn’t sure I would ever have the opportunity to be as happy as I am now.  And the future is bright.