When Anger Is Justified – Part 77: Moving Forward: College Freshman Year – Section N

Finally, I am getting back to this portion of my story. It has taken me some time. This has been a portion of my life that I have not talked about with anyone except to express it as a part of my thoughts in my journal as an offering up to God. Otherwise, I put my internal thoughts and feelings in font with no expectation that I would be affected by the outcome.

For weeks I have languished and cast this blog to the side in pursuit of other things, and for a long while, I allowed the passion for my blog to die. I felt myself dragging but not because of the blog. It was about going back in time to something I had only journaled. I was literally feeling myself reliving the past for a third time, and that is hard when the emotions from it all have not been fully addressed.

Plus, I have been battling a setback of depressive feelings and suicidal thoughts which have nothing to do with the topic of this blog, but it’s interesting how the timing coincided with the writing timeframe. Needless to say, I’m feeling better and grateful for the reader who said a prayer for me. It means so much, and I’m very appreciative. For a few weeks, I didn’t want to do anything, and I didn’t care. Exhaustion with this life was setting in, and I had to take a pause.

But let me get back to my story …

Moving Forward

After setting up a weekly time to speak with the campus chaplain about the depression and social maladies I struggled with those first few weeks of my freshman year, my life began to fall into place. The chaplain suggested that I increase my activities until I was able to take more credit hours the following school year. So I began a part-time campus job which eventually led to me babysitting for one of the faculty which then led to me babysitting for many others.

By the end of my freshman year, I was on the route to becoming emotionally stronger. I all but forgot about the issues with some of my campus-mates. It was literally like my mind dissociated from the troubles. I’d see my bullies on campus but feel distant and detached. I’d speak to them with a nod and might even indulge in conversation, but otherwise, I felt oblivious to their existence. They no longer mattered to me. All that mattered was staying focused on my studies and staying busy.

By my sophomore year, I was taking a surplus load of classes and excelling in every single one of them. I had changed my major several times with professors literally soliciting me to consider their department as a major. To be honest, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t really have a sense of direction. I felt that I needed someone to tell me. This is one of those effects of growing up being narcissistically abused – I didn’t know how to think. Thinking was always being carried out on my behalf.

Now that I was in college, I wandered around aimlessly as a perpetual student. I did so well academically, I could have majored in almost anything besides religion (I debated too often with the lead professor); dance (my menstrual periods prevented me from physical mobility); chemistry (I was yelled at by the professor for accidentally allowing a beaker filled with a dangerous substance to fall to the floor); or computer science (I worked part-time in a closeted room of a dank basement in the science center punching in a stream of numbers – boring).

Although I did not have a clue about where my life would take me, I was glad to be from underneath a blanket of dark depression. I chose to live in the moment and enjoy it all because I did not know when the next time a depressive episode might knock me off of my feet. Taking an overload of classes and working various jobs made me feel better and purposeful. I even began my own business after one of my English professors kicked me out of class for moving ahead in a lesson.

It’s funny because this same English/Lit professor encouraged me to go into English Literature as a major, but when I failed to do so because nothing about the program interested me, I seemingly became her number one enemy. She had no idea that I struggled tremendously with decoding strategies and reading comprehension. Although I loved to read, and took in and even comprehended all the information I read, it was because I was reading things that interested me.

Anyways, in English Literature, I always found the texts we read to be a struggle for me because I had no interest whatsoever. So my mind would go blank. I struggled to grasp even the literal meanings of things read in class because I had great disinterest in breaking down and devouring any texts that had no meaning to me, and this was almost in every class. How I managed to ace all of my classes with A’s is beyond me, but I was a hard worker, and I pushed myself to keep things in my mind so that I would not become depressive.

To make a very long story short, my English professor hired me to work evenings in a computer lab where I would assist night students who needed help with computer issues and writing. Because so many students needed help, I got the idea to assist some of them on the side for money. There began the idea to begin a paper writing business. I typed papers for other students for money and I charged additional fees for editing. This idea not only launched me into a type of stratosphere of no longer being “that girl who tried to kill herself” on campus, but it propelled me into another arena past depression.

I had not only gone past being a suicidal college student with an array of issues, I had placed myself in a sphere of being someone to watch. My paper writing business attracted the attention of campus businesses and off-campus businesses. This was during a time where computers were a relatively “new” advancement, and knowing how to navigate them with relative ease was a plus for me. I made good money, and despite my issues as a sometimes mute young woman, I began making friends and meeting different acquaintances. I’d even garnered enough so-called respect from the campus bullies that they no longer bothered me anymore.

There were a few hiccups and even some other trauma I suffered throughout the rest of my college days, but they were relatively good, and the friend I made during my freshman year became my roommate, then my enemy, then my friend again. During that time, I made a new friend who was a bit narcissistic, but I had my own issues too. So I happily brushed hers under the rug, while she patiently dealt with my quirks, and we trailed into a long lasting friendship that spanned decades of change until there was silence.

I was never sure about what happened, but newer friend’s life became riddled with domestic violence, and at some point, she no longer wanted to talk to me anymore. As far as the friend that became my roommate, our friendship trailed decades as well, but she was unwilling to accept me without trying to change me. So that was that.

But overall, those friends and some others, the campus chaplain, and a few professors, helped me to navigate through my college years. I rarely saw my family during that time because I sauntered to other states during breaks to work odd jobs here and there. It was a free time … even a fun time, but it all eventually caved in when I came to a stop. I had to slow down. When I did, the anger I tried so hard to diffuse began to arise to a volcanic explosion.

Stay tuned for more in the next post.