10 Apr Diary Of A Recovering College Fuckup

As I sit down in attempt to scribe a story of me overcoming adversity I’m forced to face a harsh reality…my early twenties were shitty. Let me explain. During my first year of college, I had all the same expectations and ambitions many eighteen-year-olds had: get drunk enough to barely remember the first three years and become codependent on Adderall by the fourth. Unfortunately, I exceeded most of my expectations.

I had finally accomplished my high school dreams, successfully move out of my parent’s house and still have my parents foot the bill. My cousin and I were initially supposed to move into the freshman’s dorms on campus, but because of her allergies, our parents were forced to come up with alternate plans. After a week of searching for apartments that were, both affordable for our parents to cover the cost and close enough to campus for us to commute by foot we finally found a spot right across the street from our university. My cousin and I were ecstatic; no curfew, no annoying RA, and best of all, no parents! With nothing more than our duffle bags full of clothes and a twin size blow up bed a piece, we set out on what was to be our greatest adventure yet.

This augmented reality of ours soon had real-world consequences. See, we’ve never lived this far from home or without the structure that governed our everyday lives. Soon after our parents finished settling us in and made their ways back home we were throwing huge house parties, skipping classes, and inviting complete strangers to crash on our couch for weeks at a time. After all, this was our house, but we weren’t paying the bills. It wasn’t long before we were receiving noise complaints from neighbors and giving our elderly landlord complete and utter hell.

So quite obviously, if our home life had turned into cutscenes from 21 Jump Street, our college classes weren’t holding up well either. I vividly remember stepping over any number of bodies in our hallway in attempts to get out the door and on the way to classes. By the end of my first semester, I had accumulated a GPA less than 2 digits. And I wasn’t alone. By the end of our first year, three of my friends had quit going to classes altogether and my cousin and I had been put on academic probation and were able to advance that into a complete academic suspension. To add to our despair, we had been forcefully evicted from our apartment by our landlord, leaving our parents to absorb the remaining three months’ rent.

This accumulation of reckless decision making forced me to take a three-year hiatus from school. I re-enrolled as a more mature and responsible twenty-three-year-old. Although I do have my regrets surrounding my first attempt at college and the headache I gave my parents, I am thankful to have had the time away from school to explore more non-traditional avenues outside of a formal education and discover how to place my own value on my education. May 2013, eight years after I originally enrolled in college, I graduated with my undergraduate degree in communication.