Journey Before Destination

College was rough for me.

I had spent my last two years of high school at a residential "smart school" where I lived with all my friends and, despite my depression, generally felt at home and happy.



High school graduation day was one of the worst days of my life, because I knew I would be forcibly leaving my home and friends behind. I would no longer be comfortable.

Secretly, I was dying inside.

And I was right. College was very different, in part because I attended a commuter campus. The upside was that most everyone there wanted to be there. The downside was that everyone went home after class. It made it very difficult to make friends. Add to this the fact that I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life (and therefore didn't know which classes I should be taking) and I generally felt aimless and life was dull.

To fix this (and try to recapture some of what I had felt in high school) I decided to transfer to IU Bloomington with one of my Academy friends and begin double majoring in physics and astrophysics.

It didn't go well. Between my stress over all the loans I took out for this privilege, my newfound friend group that I used to procrastinate, and my still undealt-with depression, I had a poor semester. So poor, in fact, that I failed my first classes ever and returned home even more hopeless and frustrated than before.

I went back to IUN for a semester before deciding that I needed a break. So rather than enter my third year of college, I moved back to Bloomington for the sole purpose of working and having a good time.

Believe it or not, this was a good decision for me. I got some more job experience under my belt, got promoted to supervisor at Baja Fresh, and generally felt a bit better about my life. I took salsa lessons for fun, started playing Magic weekly at the game store (which is when I got good at the game), and solidified my friendships with the people I had met the year before. While I didn't seem to be accomplishing much, I planted a lot of seeds for things that would be important in the future.

After a year of this, I knew the fun was over and I needed to get back to my college career. The problem remained: what was my career exactly? I didn't know. So I took chemistry and calculus, classes I knew would be important for a variety of career paths. These were fun (if difficult) classes, and probably the best time I had in college. But after a full year of that, and I was still no closer to figuring out what classes I needed to take next.



So when enrollment for the next year opened up, I just...didn't enroll. Depression was creeping back in, and the lack of direction wasn't helpful. I spent several months just playing video games and doing nothing else when my dad sat down and told me I needed to do something, anything. This little talk ruined my DotA game, but he was right.

I got a job working at a bar & grill, which was unexciting but fine.  I continued to focus mostly on video games in my free time, and pretty soon another year was gone.

I got the point that I was sick of sitting around doing nothing. I was sick of wasting all my time instead of accomplishing the things that I wanted to. I felt like I just needed to finish a degree, any degree. I sat down and looked at IUN's various majors and found one that would only take three semesters from where I was -- Spanish.

Now I had a direction. Because I knew what I had decided to do, there was no excuse for missing enrollment or taking blowoff classes. Every class I took was one I needed to graduate. I got a job on campus so I had an easily-accessible job. Three semesters later, I finally received my bachelor's degree. It only took six and a half years for a four-year degree.

This is probably my diploma.

But I don't regret it. It took me a lot of time wandering to finally realize that I have the need and the ability to take active control of my life. Things aren't just going to fall into place. They happen as a result of my choices.

And a lot of the time I wasted resulted in some pretty good things. One of my best friends I met at Bloomington, and we get together to play board games pretty frequently. My job in the math lab those last two years allowed me to meet a friend who introduced me to my now girlfriend. And my delayed graduation allows me to work at Ball State while she is finishing up her degree.

Everything happens for a reason. Not necessarily because everything is part of some grand plan, but because our choices are meaningful, and everything happens because we made choices that led us to those things. And no matter which choices you make in life, you will eventually find meaning in what came before. Life goes on no matter how poorly things have been in the past.

True to that, I still have good days and days where I waste all my time crippled by anxiety and feeling overwhelmed. But it's never too late to make good choices either.