People Like Me Don’t Become College Students

That’s what I used to tell myself growing up because no one around me ever went to college.

Jail? Sure, but college, no. It’s funny, though, because I always had the broke part of being a college student down, but never the college student part.

Perhaps I was always supposed to be broke but never a student.

At least that would have been true if I never took the first step on a college campus.

Wanting more was rare and often looked down on

When I was growing up, there was only one person who was known to have gone onto university, but he was often hated by others in the home.

“He thinks he is better than us,” they would say. The truth being, he wanted to get away as far as possible from home, and one couldn’t blame him. He never looked back except on rare occasions.

He was also the oldest and had left home even before we, the younger ones, got to know him, so we didn’t get to witness his journey.

The jealousy towards him would drip from the lips of those who were old enough to have jobs and attend college classes but instead lived in the basement, filling their lungs with weed, their blood with alcoholic drinks, while their minds rotted with poisonous thoughts about everyone else but themselves. This environment went on for years

I just had a phone call today with a younger family member who witnessed the same dynamic, and we had the same thoughts about how we internalized that college was only meant for those who were of a certain class or stature.

Those thoughts were reinforced by our struggles with learning and our educational journey gone awry in our younger years.

Breaking away from an environment is always jarring

Today, I told that person that it was never them; it was the fact we never had the proper upbringing to learn and retain what we needed in order to feel like we had a chance at a higher education.

During the phone call, they mentioned that they wouldn’t even know what going to college would look or what it would feel like, and I told them it would be a shock to their system and might bring up a mixture of feelings because college has the tendency to show the gaps in people’s lives.

• How much they were neglected.

• How different upbringings and environments make it easier for others to adjust to such settings.

• The privileges behind some students.

College has the tendency to make you reverse-engineer your life and look at it and realize what could have been, what should have been.

But it also gives you a chance to realize you can still adjust and become the student of your highest potential.

You can become a part of the environment through hardened efforts that no one can take from you. You can fill the gaps of what you have been missing.

People like us normally don’t go to college, but when we do, we often become some of the best students.

By the time we hung up the phone, we had chiseled away some of these thought patterns, and they felt more inspired than before to look into it.

Sometimes it takes someone from the environment to break the cycle, the curse, if you will, so that the next person can lean on you and climb the ladder with encouragement that college is the right place for them too. I, myself, don’t mind looking back for those who are reaching out from the right place.