Resurrection Squared

I slithered out of high school with a 1.7 GPA. The morning of my graduation, I had to wait by the phone to see if I was going to be able to walk across the stage with my friends. There was no graduation party for me. The only celebration was the exhausted sigh of a mother who had fought and scraped and conferenced herself into a frenzy for the preceding eight years to get me through the public school system.


My two best friends went to the University of Michigan, both with some sort of scholarship. Almost everyone around me was going to college. I was the exception in my high school. I am undereducated. In the crowds I like to run with, I’m still the exception today.


My battle cry in high school was that my grades were no reflection on my intelligence. I tested very well. I knew I was smart. My grand plan seemed to be to ace my English classes and fail everything else. The biggest problem was that I had trouble showing up to anything else. Bestie A and our other best friend would sometimes try to bribe me.

“If you go to all your classes today,” they would say, their voices sugary sweet with promise, “we’ll take you to lunch tomorrow.”

I was the only child of a single mom. I didn’t ask for money to eat out. We lived on the edgiest edge of a school district that had a lot of money. From where I sat, my friends were very wealthy. They were going to Cancun and Fort Lauderdale for spring break. I was doing… other things. Going out to lunch was a luxury.

“Yes,” I would say earnestly, “I will go to all my classes today.”

But then Matt so-and-so would ask me to go smoke a joint with him in the parking lot and I’d have to go do that instead. Those good intentions would try really hard to move me toward that stupid math class I was in, but then I’d see all those zitty horrible freshman sitting there, humiliating me with their very presence, and I wouldn’t have a choice but to walk on by. I didn’t belong there at all.

When it came right down to it, there were only a couple things I liked about school. And they were mostly boys. It was a disaster.

Perhaps you’ll be happy to hear that I did walk across that stage. My mother brought her tribal drums and beat them when my name was called. My vice principal, Mr. Collins, asked me if I knew who those people were as he shook my hand. His eyes were twinkling with pleasure, seeing me in the cap and gown that had nothing to do with what I deserved. That was the true pisser. Everyone loved me. I was precocious and charming and everyone was pulling for me. Pulled me right through high school, frankly. By so much less than the skin of my teeth.

My mom and I left Detroit for Montana shortly after my 18th birthday, plans of going to community college to get my shit together and then transfer to UofM left in the dust of our Subaru Legacy. I was going to take a year off. You know how that goes. We got to Billings and more boys got involved and that was the end of that.

When I was 20, I did a brief stint at Montana State University-Billings. For the past 15 years, I have been telling people I four-pointed college, that I left after my second semester in yet another attempt to get it together. The real story is that I got a 4.0 my first semester. My second and final semester in college, I was shocked to learn recently, went out in a blaze of F-ing glory. I flunked everything.

The truth is, I am a quitter. I’ve quit almost everything that’s ever meant anything to me. I quit college. I quit people. I quit jobs. I quit paying my bills. I quit dreams. I quit goals. I quit exercising. I quit trying. I quit eating healthy. I quit writing. I quit blogs. I. Am. A. Quitter.

I’m smack dab in the middle of this crazy experience right now that is making me look all of this right in its fat ugly face.

I am going to college.

It’s just one class. Don’t get excited.

It turns out God moved us 3.95 miles from one of the best creative writing programs in the country. And after all this heartbreak, a new path might be emerging. I seriously want to puke just writing that, but I have to be honest. It started to seem a shame, a waste of some pretty divine orchestration.

So I just took the next indicated action, which seemed to be going to talk to someone, an advisor. I have one of those now. We talked about my options. I fed her the replacement phrase for the whole grades/intelligence bullpucky: “I can’t see myself taking a pre-algebra class so I can get a piece of paper. I’m 37 years old.” She sent me to the head of the creative writing department, to whom I shoveled out the same line.

She didn't seem to pay that much mind.

What she said was that I should submit some work. I happened to be sitting in her office four short weeks before the deadline to do so. I was to write a short story, something I’d never done before, and submit it to some professors who were teaching some upper division creative writing workshops. I was to include a letter detailing some of the other experience I’ve had in my writing life that was supposed to compensate for all those years of not going to college.

So I took the next indicated action. I wrote the story, though I hadn’t written anything new in nearly a year. I wrote the story, though I was steeped in great and pathetic sadness. The song came to me, as it always does, by magic, and I wrote the story.

I took my ass down to that scary and complicated building and found my way to the mailboxes of those professors and I put the freakin’ envelope in the freakin’ box. And then I walked out of that place real fast. And then I went on with my life. I’ve gotten very used to not waiting.

Turns out I got in. I found out unexpectedly, by the hand of a lovely woman who didn’t know I didn’t know. She congratulated me on Facebook while I was in Billings, surrounded by the very, very closest people in the world to me. The Universe loves me like that.

So. Here I am, The Quitter, on the eve of this new adventure. Scared out of my mind that it won’t work, that it’ll be another dead end, that it won’t lead anywhere else, that I'm fundamentally not cut out for this, that I’ll just be the old woman in a room with kids who’re on that track – you know, the one I’m not on.

Except I am on it I guess. And I’m of a mind right now not to wonder too hard where it’s going to go. If I think too hard about that, I might be tempted to quit.