I've had some problems recently. It's a good thing really, since now I have something to write about in my blog. I was hoping I would have nothing to write about for a minute, but nope. Immediately problems.
In order for you to really understand what's been going on, I'm going to have to describe my situation.
About three weeks ago I dropped out of college. I got a lot of flack for doing that so early in the semester (I was two weeks in), but it needed to happen. Ever since I had applied I had felt a crushing... feeling. I'm not sure what it was because I'm not well-versed in complex emotion, but trapped feels like a good term. And when I say it was crushing, I mean it.
I applied to college many months out. It was within the first weeks of summer, I believe. I'm not really sure why I applied, honestly. It almost felt like a joke. At the time I was not up on the knowledge of how colleges work, who they accept, how they decide who to accept and all that, so I was falling back on memories of movies and TV shows for information. This fallback told me that college was hard to get into; getting accepted was something to be prepared for and celebrated upon completion. So naturally me, a perfectly average student, would never get accepted... To a state university... Yeah. Whoops! Getting accepted was exciting, but also scary. Exciting because that meant I was going to college, scary because that meant I was going to college. Interestingly, my whole life I never thought I would go. I had always been inconvenienced by school as I felt that it was impeding on my artistic endeavors, so no way was I going to do unnecessary school after I graduated high school. Absolutely no way. . . . . So anyway, I was all set up and ready to start my bachelor's in computer science in late August, and that's when the feeling started to creep its way into the depths of my mind.
I am stuck here. For four years.
You'd think that once I started feeling that way I would have taken back my application or something, but I did not. My family was supportive and also biased. They were very excited for me to go to college and make my bag, and whenever I confided in them, they told me it was a normal feeling which I'm still sure it is. But as the days moved on, they became longer with less time. Every day felt so gruelingly long, yet I never was able to complete everything I wanted. Nothing would get done. My hobbies, supposed to be flourishing under the summer sun, began to slow. My time sat with no thoughts began to grow. I was feeling extremely stuck. I was in a punishment of my own design and it was sucking the joy from my life.
Then I went to the mountain. Back when I was getting everything sorted out for going to college and whatnot, I was given an opportunity to meet some students ahead of time up in the mountain. It was to be a three day long ordeal where I make friends to keep during the semester. A head start for social life. I accepted, because at the time I had no friends.
The day eventually came around to go up to the mountain. I was kind of dreading it, but I met someone early on and she helped me introduce myself. Long story short, I ended the trip with a handful of friends that I still have to this day. It worked!
Unfortunately, though we did stay in contact after the trip, nobody was able to see eachother till school started. That trip gave me something to look forward to, but it did not fix how I was feeling. When I came back home, I was quickly reminded of my situation and everything went to how it was before. Slow and not slow enough. The days kept getting longer and a pit in my stomach kept growing wider as the starting date closed in. I was anxious and trapped. I had trouble getting to sleep and trouble waking up. I wouldn't say I was depressed, this felt different, but I definately, definately, was not okay.
Flash forward a couple uneventful and hardly productive weeks. College has started. I live in town so I did not pay for a dorm or dinning on-campus, but I was still barely ever home. My new schedule was class, eat, work, friends maybe, repeat. I saw my family less and less and my friends were all too busy to talk. Between classes I was forced to walk through crowds upon crowds of people. That's something that really got to me. I'll explain that more in another post, though. My classes were easy, but accessing everything I needed was confusing. I figured it out, but never stopped feeling overwhelmed. I was constantly bombarded by stress and disappointment and confusion. And worst of all, that feeling of being trapped, that claustrophobia, continued to seep deeper and deeper into me. I got behind on one of my most required classes on week one because I couldn't understand how to view the information. My brain was miserable. If I thought I was in a bad emotional state before starting college, this was tenfold. I began to long for the weeks before, even the days before when my anxiety was at its peak, because they began to look like a mental walk in the park. It was bad. I was thinking poorly.
I didn't want to tell anyone, because who would I tell? I don't have a therapist, my friends were feeling overwhelmed, and my family was proud of me. I told them I was having fun and that every day was good. As the days went on and my emotional and mental state continued to fail, I realized what had to be done. I had to drop out. It wasn't really a choice at this point, my options were drop out, or suffer greatly. It's not even that I think I would be suffering that bad my whole time at college, it's more that I don't think I could endure just a few more weeks of that. There were some other factors at play, but I'll explain those some other time.
And so, on my second week of college, I told my family that I was dropping out and I already submitted the withdrawal. Of course, they were shocked. "I thought you were having a good time though, Wes!" "This is just so sudden." "Are you sure?" "Everyone feels like that on their first weeks."... You get the idea. It came out of nowhere because I kept telling them I was having fun like a lying little fox. They came around soon though and informed me that I needed to get a job or something because they refuse to let be become a bum. I knew that was what I needed to do. I had already created a plan to drop out and apply for a job literally everywhere. It's funny that I thought that would work...
Go to immediately problems part 2 to keep reading.