I dropped out of high school during my sophomore year, when I was 15. I had huge amounts of intellect, but I hated school, felt depressed and couldn’t find the motivation to keep going. I spent the next three years not doing much. I worked for a few months and took some community college classes, but that was it. My parents believed I needed that time to “figure things out,” so they supported me.
Today, I’m 22, and the intervening years have brought a ton of good changes for me. I’m halfway through my bachelor’s degree and I’m an A student. I have a good job, I’m getting married next year, and I’m planning for grad school.
I know I should be content with the choices I made as a teenager, because they eventually led me to where I am today, which is a good place. There’s no reason to believe I’d be any happier if I’d finished high school and gone straight to college. No one else condemns me for being a high school dropout, but I can’t help condemning myself sometimes. I still think about how I wasted all that time, how much potential I had, how I should have been a big success and I wasn’t.
I’d like to really accept my past and feel comfortable with it, not ashamed of it. I’d like to be able to concentrate on doing well in the present without thoughts of the past and how I need to “make up” for it. I think that’s when I’ll know I’ve achieved this goal.
