Ten years ago, I went to university (I love when other nationalities refer to college as “university”…makes us Americans sound that much more common). I studied journalism because logic dictated that it was the best decision. I could write which, a few years beforehand, I concluded was my calling. And I could depend on a steady paycheck; an ideal without basis, given print media’s decay since 1999.
It made sense. Never mind that I enjoyed fiction and poetry (at the time, I wrote more of the latter than the former) and I found journalism to be insufferable and, in many ways, incongruent to who I was as a person. Having to interview people for assignments was painful for me, not because I couldn’t come up with questions, but because it required a type of social grace I lacked for some time, still do on occasion: the ability to hold a conversation with total strangers.
Ten years later, I’m considering a plan to return to school, this time to walk away with a degree in creative writing. What am I afraid of? Well…what else when it comes to college education? Wasting my money, either now or with interest for the next ten or fifteen years, on a degree that, on its face, will not guarantee any modicum of income.
It comes down to a question of usage. How do I intend to use the classes and, eventually, the degree? The classes will provide for me more structure, which I need, and it’ll force me to buckle down, so to speak, to treat my work less of a hobby and more of a profession, with all caveats for failure understood and appreciated, more so than I’d like to recognize.
So how would I use my degree? Well, somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d like to teach one day, which would require an MFA, but that’s for another post. I intend to use it as a means to enrich my life and take control of my life, a rare commodity for humans in a world where fear-mongering is the de facto persuasion tactic of choice.
One of the greatest fallacies taught to my generation was that a college degree equated to material success and security. There are many brokenhearted, indebted and therefore, broke individuals because they literally thought a degree in of itself is a golden ticket to the middle-class, that nebulous caste that everyone thinks they belongs to and no one can truly define.
The other side of the fallacy is the acquisition of a degree for security independent of the student’s actual desire. So what you have now is a grip of doctors and lawyers who’d rather slit their wrists than participate in their profession for another day. Maybe not that hyperbolic, but the spirit remains accurate.
I like food, clothes and a roof over my head as much as the next man. But as a recovering depressive, I’ve developed an appreciation to do whatever it takes to live as true of a life as you can, lest find yourself inconsolable, insufferable, insane or worst, in a ditch somewhere after being snapped in half by fear, which begets disappointment.
Not “disappointment” like a failed business, but “disappointment” in living each day for decades saying, “One day I’m going to open a business” and never taking the necessary leap to make that happen. Never trying. Never holding enough belief in your faculties, in yourself, to approach the minefield with care and education…and traverse it anyway, because you know something better is on the other side. I rather get blown up on the way to the other side than to live like that again. Real talk.
So call it an exercise in idealism. To me, the choice is simple: go back to school as a creative writer or don’t go at all, because there’s no other profession, no other course of study, that interests me as much or more. Since everyone remains insistent that a college degree is the way to go, so be it. In the end, I shouldn’t have to forgo a college education because my degree doesn’t come with a lab coat or business suit. And until America is no longer America, I don’t have to make that sacrifice, even as a black man. I have my parents to thank for that.
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