When I was much younger, I quit university.
At the time, I was facing a bank of tremendous personal challenges, battling C-PTSD, addiction, and depression.
Eventually I cleaned up and got on the right medication.
I received counseling, took some tough advice to heart, and began putting in the mental and physical work that was, and still is, necessary to keep myself healthy.
I got off the medication.
Several times in the years since, I have pursued opportunities to further my education in a classroom setting, but that door has repeatedly, and sometimes violently, slammed shut.
I have spent many sleepless nights in a cold sweat, immersed in regret. What did I do to my life?
I'm sure this is all trying to tell me something, maybe that there is another way, that there is something else I'm supposed to do; something I'm missing.
I have a love-hate relationship with writing. While I love to come up with ideas and words truly excite me, I find the act of writing itself kind of a drag. I lack focus and self discipline. I am my own worst enemy in this regard and often don't have the grit or persistence to stay the course when going after things I want, including writing the books I have ideas for. Poetry, at least, doesn't outstay my attention span.
This is the same reason I almost need a classroom setting, with projects and deadlines to force me to follow through. I could attempt to educate myself, but my interests are all over the map and I spend more time roving from one subject to the next than getting anything done. While I'm clean now and basically healthy, I still have the nature of an addict, flights of fancy and all that stuff.
The doors closing are financial setbacks, programs I failed to qualify for by a margin, and this last time, I was accepted to a college but had to go back to work instead because my husband lost his job. Some people can do both school and work, but with a family, I'm not one of them. I'm not resentful, just resigned.
The answers are shrouded in a deep mist of having been beaten down, and feeling my whole life has become about getting back up. Like there is nothing else, only a stuck record replaying an old song with a broken needle. The static bounces down the corridor of years; rise, and fall, and rise, and fall again.
Is there a choice you made in your life that had consequences you could never have imagined? What lessons have you learned along the way?