The Education of a College Dropout
I started this post in July of 2019, close to five years ago. If I recall correctly, I published it for about twenty minutes and then unpublished it.
Since then, I have successfully graduated from to two different life coaching schools, earned my ICF ACC and PCC, attended a Cultivating Emotional Balance retreat, spent a year in Compassionate Inquiry training, coached close to one thousand hours, and I’ve gone back to school to finish my undergraduate degree. As I write this, I’m half way through the BSPsy completion program at CIIS in San Francisco! It’s really hard and really wonderful. I will complete my program a few days before my 56th birthday, this August. Which is approximately 38 years after I started college. I would not have been able to apply to and attend this program had I not done all that other coursework. The lesson I needed more than anything was that I was capable of learning and making a meaningful contributing to this work I have chosen, the work of holding space and supporting others as they evolve their understanding of who they are and face the obstacles that may have been in their way for as many or more years than my hiatus from college has been. I also needed to know that I could finish what I started. Even if it took me 38 years.
July 2019
In case you’re curious, I'm the college dropout. There, I said it. That’s a piece of information that I don’t volunteer often and have closely guarded for three decades.
Since dropping out of college (more than once) I am an almost unrecognizable woman in some ways and same as I ever was in others. The big difference? I’m finally comfortably me. I’m at peace with who I am and mostly accepting of my shortcomings. The biggest shortcoming I’m talking about is me in relationship to traditional education. How it failed me, how I failed it and how I find myself at 50+ feeling relatively good about the things I’ve been able to teach myself or organically learn over the past couple decades. I discovered successful people who forged their own journeys using unique or patch-worked learning experiences over time and they opened my mind to my own possibilities. Until recently, other people’s non-traditional educations seemed totally valid for everyone but me.
What’s really transformed my view of “my education” is looking at the shame that has vexed me for most of my life and allowing myself to separate myself from it on a good day. That has been a hard won and VERY recent self-acceptance. I have two boys who are similarly “gifted” with unique learning styles, and this has forced me to go back and look, tho I fought that hard. And while this is not a post about regrets; I was fucking stubborn about avoiding myself. Avoiding myself made it difficult for me to see my boy’s learning experiences as something other than [repeats of] my own. Another way to say that is that I didn’t see them, I saw myself when they were struggling with school. I relived my educational trauma through their challenges. I struggled to be an affective advocate for my kids. It’s a lesson I am finally able to see. And one worth sharing, despite feeling raw and a little tender around this subject.
Here’s an idea of what my young mind was working with as I woke for school every day ready to tackle my job of being a student:
My thoughts about education before I dropped out of college:
Being unique and independent is extraordinarily important.
Being different makes you feel like an outcast.
Fitting in means getting school, getting good grades, performing or outperforming peers.
Being unique, independent, and fitting in are key to success as an adult.
Trying to be unique and fit at the same time is confusing-contradictory, even.
Using someone else’s definition of success is anxiety provoking and uninspiring.
Here’s an idea of how I transformed the stories from above to suit my own need to learn and grow and evolve into the best version of myself I wanted:
My thoughts on learning after dropping out of college:
Investigate what inspires me, be drawn in by it, basque in it, follow it where it takes me.
Curiosity is energizing and inspires creativity in multiple channels of my mind.
Allowing myself time to notice, absorb, and create it will help me learn things and love myself.
Failure is a necessary component of success and I will survive failure and be better for it.
I’m definitely unique and similar to a lot of successful and unsuccessful people - And I’m willing to accept my own experience of education and other people’s experiences as valid. VALID And Different.
Defining my own success is absolutely necessary if I’m going to succeed!
Keep in mind this change has taken me decades (I’m a slow processor. For real!). Part of the reason for this reflection is that my oldest son is going to be a senior next year and he is determined to attend a four year college. I think it’s great and I know he can do it, start to finish, I know he can. It’s not clear to me that he knows this to be true yet. And I wish so deeply that I had been more willing to look carefully at what I needed and wanted before I leapt into something that everyone else was doing because it was the next thing to do.
