Where I went to school

*TW: Suicide, and suicidal thoughts

“Where do you go to school?”

“I don’t.”

“Oh, so you’ve already graduated?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well if you went to school what would you go to school for?”

I went to school. I went to get away like most kids do. I took too many classes, and overworked myself in order to stick to that four year plan. I spent 8k out of pocket and another 4k in loans that I'm still paying off three years later all for one semester.

I went to school. I had a professor who taught English as well as how to get away with coming onto students. He said he could picture her, the girl who always sat in the front, sitting in her bath with a loofah. We were supposed to be learning about Edgar Allen Poe but all I learned was how awful all those headlines sound and how much worse it is for the story to never be heard. I said it, sure. I did what they tell you to do. I told the school and they told me I had two options, to drop it or for them to make an official report. But if the report was made official then he would know who made the complaint and I was scared to come forward. They wouldn’t let me switch classes and so I stopped showing up to what usually was my favorite one.

My roommate often stayed with her boyfriend, and that left me with a lot of alone time with my thoughts, which for me has never been good. A Lot of the things I had been trying to avoid for so long started to resurface in my nightmares. I felt very alone and isolated, only ever leaving my dorm room for what I absolutely needed and nothing else. I spent many nights laying on the floor soaked from my own tears imagining things I could do myself. How I could stop feeling like such a burden, a disappointment, how I could finally stop fucking everything up, and how everyone would no longer have to worry about me. I was suicidal. I didn’t admit it to anyone, but I knew it myself.

I went to college, and I’m afraid of ever going back because I know school wasn’t the sole reason I wanted to end my life, but it was what almost pushed me over. What’s worse is I know I’m not the only one either. I know friends who had to leave for stories that sound all too similar to mine. I’m afraid because I wonder if I will ever have what it takes to actually have college be of benefit to me and my life. Will I push myself again all for nothing? Will I have worked so hard all for a paper degree in a job in an industry that is dying? Will I lose even more money that I don’t have, and now will I have to continue to work the two jobs I have now in order to support myself while going to school? I don’t know. But what I do know is, I am in school. You may not have heard of it, but I actually go to the school of denial everyday. Learning different ways of telling strangers at my real jobs how to stop asking without being impolite. The discomfort hanging in between the sentences they are so casually asking someone whose responses would not be nearly as casual. For I may look like a bright young scholar and maybe I am, but I don’t feel like one. I don’t feel like anyone actually. Standing here for 8 hours barely moving back and forth bagging items and sticking to the mandatory customer service script.

When you work in a job revolving around or somehow relating to customer service, many of us are not nearly as happy, or as satisfied as we are paid to seem. Many of us do or do not go to school for various reasons, and that may blow your mind, but the reasons why should not have to be disclosed to you. We are real people, with real lives, and my struggles were not to be survived in order to be made into a five minute chit-chat. And really, if we lived by your expectations of how successful a good American should be, then who do you think would be filling these jobs? Face it. In order for you to be successful at all in this system many others have to find themselves very unsuccessful by the same standard. We are here to serve you, and you are here as a reminder of what so many of us can never be. School or no school. This is how it is to live in our society.