The new semester of school starts this week. My first class is today. What do I study in school? I’m in the addiction studies field. What specifically is interesting me within this field is family illness, the concept of addiction being a family disease as opposed to there being only one diseased individual lost within a “perfect” family. Super exciting and interesting stuff, it really makes me excited to go to school and learn.
And I’m scared.
School to me has always been a bit of an emotionally traumatic experience even though it has been getting progressively better. Last semester was good, but there is still a ton of room for imporovement. The problem I come across is that I just simply have not have had the repeated experienced of kicking ass and getting straight A’s over and over again so I simply don’t know that it is something that I can continuously do. The A’s I get at this point feel like luck, like kind of a fluke. From kicking ass in other areas of my life, getting what would be considered A’s in those areas, I have learned that to get to that point all I need to do is to work really hard and eventually that hard work will just end up being what I always do. I can say that I understand how to get A’s but I cannot say that I have the experience of bring an A student.
Why all this focus on getting A’s as opposed to B’s? Honestly I’m not sure what the source of it is. Probably the insanely passionate and near perfectionistic scholastic drive of all my other family members and peers growing up and my lack of communicative skills as a wee lad. I have heard that the behavior patterns introduced to a child’s life by the age of 9 will usually be what that child carries through life unless some very intense behavioral modification takes place at some point later on. This makes sense in my experience. I went to a very good school up until I was about 10 years old. This school basically does not accept anything less than perfection, at least that’s what it felt like. Not that that’s bad, I’m just not one of those “perfect” people nor do I ever want to be. I had a rough time there. I had tourettes, the twitching and stuttering kind, a light OCD (usually comes in a package with tourettes), ADHD, and a good strong anxiety disorder. All of these I have either grown out of or have come to a beautiful level of acceptance with so it’s either all gone or a non-issue. I’ve done some really serious work to get here but in school at that age it sucked. It was the worst. Here’s what really roughs me up about it, some of the other kids may have had similar issues but I felt alone because we just never talked about it. There was no emotional communication. The school just didn’t care about that. I essentially felt like I didn’t fit in in a school where everyone else did, where from my eyes at the time I saw everyone taking the same instruction as me and kicking ass while I floundered and struggled. Today I know this is not the truth. Elementary school for most anyone is super rough, it’s just that at that age we weren’t sharing how roug it was with eachother.
After my family and I realized that this specific school was not for me, I went to another school, a far more liberal school. From what I understand it was one of the first montesorry-type-alternative-learning schools in California, I could be wrong about that though. Regardless, it was amazing. At that point had been in the school where I felt isolated for so long that the fear and isolation had become a part of my scholastic identity. It still is to this day a little but not nearly as much as it was then.
I continured to go to that alternative learning school through Jr High then found and incredible boarding school in Los Olivos along the same vein and went. The boarding school had right around 2,800 acres of ranch / mountain land and about 120 or so kids thorough out all 4 grades. Chopping wood to stay warm, hiking, camping, running, cycling, wilderness, I feel so blessed to be there yet for some reason I was super lonely and depressed there as well.
I’m not trying to shape this post into a “woe is me” type thing, this stuff is all super managable now in my life, so it’s all good. I was a different dude back then. I am however trying to express how ingraned all this was within me.
So there I was at a heaven of a school and still I wanted to go home. That school was so alternative to anything society had taught us was “cool”, “good”, and “the way” that it felt alien to a ton of the students too, not just me. It’s basically the perfect school for 2012, all next level though, self explorative, organic garden, personal accountability, life lessons type learning.
I only stayed there for 2 years until I missed my family so much that I needed to come home. I went to another really cool alternative learning school that I really really loved a lot. It’m not sure how to describe it. It was a school specifically designed for kids that have disabilities of all types. It was so rad to be around other kids that had the same issues as me. The cerriculium was specifally designed around the education of kids that had had problems at others “normal” sclools. Like me! It helped so much being in all these special scholastic environments, especially the last school.
The problem is that I got used to the alternative learing styles and ended up going to a community college after taking a year off going to art schools and stuff like that. Community colleges aren’t bad, they are just different from what I was used to. They are general, they have a generalized curriculum that is NOT good for all kids. It reminded me of my first school so much, that semi-traumatic school, that I went into a weird emotional relaplse and froze up. I just couldn’t get it right. Over and over again semester after semester year after year, I jumped back and forth from community college to work to community college to work floundering in a world where I was contunually told that success can only come from good grades and I just couldnt get those good grades no matter how hard I tried. I felt trapped in a crazy seemingly unmanagable and out of control world where it looked like everyone else around me had a full grasp on reality and how to succeed. I felt like a failure.
This is what has statyed with me year after year until realitively recently. Words cannot describe how freeing it is to feel like I am walking away from that but, as I was writing before that I have just not repeatedly kicked enough ass to have the reality of great grades as my expectaton for this up coming semester. It’ll happen no doubt, I just need to keep on the good path I started last semester. I got good grades last semester. C B B A. Those I feel are grades to be proud of especially looking at my past history. My goal however obviously is A A A A. These days it’s for different reasons then it used to be though. I no longer feel that A A A A means I am more of a successful human and all around better person than if I got C B B A. I used to though. This is the big difference. This difference, this new pair of scholastic glasses I am looking through is making me a far happier person. I want A A A A because I’ll just feel better when, and I say WHEN, I get them. It will feel like I have done something that once was impossible and that is and awesome thing.
The main lesson I feel that I have learned through that complicated and rough schoolastic path I described before is the importance of communication. At the time, as a kid, it was near impossoble with my stutters and twitches from the tourettes but still. It is the #1 most important thing a human can do, commincate feelings. I say this because almost everyone I tell this story to and everyone I talk to about haveing a super rough time in school relates and shares their own story of similar happenings. As good as this feels to hear now, I feel that if I only had the ability to reach out and talk about this as a child it would have made a world of difference, I would have felt less isolated within myself I would have felt like we all were struggling together. That isolation and fear that school will one day transoform back into what it was, parts of that rotten taste remain within me and that is exactly what makes me scared to go back to school. The more I talk to my teachers, make friends with other students, join study groups, and become an overall productive participant changes that taste changes to the sweet taste of schoolastic success. Kind of like cupcakes. I love cupcakes.
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Patrick Smith Walker 