You put down the phone.
The call you just made has you pacing back and forth, irrationally working yourself up and down your mind. What now? You try the breathing exercises that your school therapist gave you. Nothing. Ok. Head for the gym downstairs. Just to get some quiet, or maybe even some noise. Anything but this. You make it to the elevator, but fall flat on the concrete floor in front of it. As the world is reduced to a dark tunnel, you shake violently, crying profusely as your heart pumps harder to draw shallow breaths. A stranger finds you and manages to call your soon-to-be ex girlfriend to come peel you off of the floor.
And that’s about how it starts. You lay there in bed, thinking to yourself, “Did I really just drop out of college?”.
Now, when most people think about taking time off from school they imagine a second summer. Trips to Tokyo and South American countries filled with photogenic tourist spots tailor-made to strengthen the integrity of their Instagram timeline. This, for me, was out of the question. I was broke as fuck. And according to (insert any survey of your choice), so are many of you reading this. The job that I did have, I hated. Honestly, I hated a lot about my life.
Therapy had presented me with a rabbit hole of philosophy, morality, and self-reflection. Inside the rabbit hole, I found a wall. The wall loomed over everything I thought I had built up to that point. I stood beneath it, watching it stretch out into infinity from end to end. I found a crack, and through that I could see just beyond it. To the other side. There, over the white stone brim, was a light. A second road.
So I turned around.
The only way you can effectively move forward is to tread back over what had come before. When I did, I saw things that I did not remember. There was self-hatred where there had been sexual triumph. There was a wealth of social-anxiety stemming from self-importance. And a lack of self-respect, which manifested itself in an inability to set any real boundaries. There was a lot. Maybe too much.
So much of my life had been dedicated to school, and so much of my identity had been predicated on who I was within the context of academia. The moment I hung up that phone, the essence of who I was had been eradicated. Blown to shit. I was somebody for sure. But at the same time, I was nobody at all really. Just a figment of somebody else’s imagination.
I dropped everything until there was just me, my family, my close friends, and the small city of Denton, Texas.
This was all I needed to be happy, but in the beginning I wasn’t so sure. Post-codependency is a bitch. Post-quarter life crisis is even more of a bitch. And though the urge existed, I didn’t reach out or latch on to anyone right away. It would only restart the cycle. I knew this process would require complete introspection. So I learned to be alone. Begrudgingly, but then happily, alone.
I wrote the first word that came to mind every morning, free-styling it out into one or two page journal entries. Books began to line the walls and corners of my room. I became more expressive, more human than all my years of social performance could ever hope to achieve. I even made a mantra.
I WILL RESPECT MY OWN WISHES
I WILL RESPECT MY OWN OPINIONS
I WILL RESPECT MY OWN GOALS
I WILL RESPECT MY OWN TIME
I WILL RESPECT MY OWN BODY
I WILL RESPECT MY OWN PEACE
I WILL WORK ON MYSELF AS I HAVE WORKED ON MYSELF FOR OTHERS
I AM IMPORTANT BECAUSE I EXIST
I EXIST, THEREFORE I AM IMPORTANT
I read it out loud every morning, and eventually removed the word “important” when I began studying the ego. Confidence is key, but you’ll never have true confidence if it hinges on how “valuable” or “important” you are. Value is determined in the eyes of others and then reflected upon the self. So just as easily as you can be valued, you can be devalued. You must find power in simply being. Now read it again.
I dropped alcohol too. For the year. I’ve been a binge drinker (read: alcoholic) since I was 15 to deal with anxiety-inducing situations (read: breathing). It’s a destructive cycle that I still struggle with, even in its absence. My friends and my family are what kept and keep me together. If I could boil it down to a milestone, dancing in public sober with my friends was probably my favorite, and a first for me. They taught me how to have fun without the mask, and in turn, taught me how to be. I’m thankful for them.
Still, my sabbatical was incomplete. There was another large hurdle left to overcome: leaving my protective, narcissistic little bubble as a creative.
I write films. Direct them too. I can say that now because I’ve stopped hoarding screenplays and old films on my laptop, and started showing them to people. Letting my projects live lives of their own. Lives that can be criticized, ripped to shreds and even, loved. Opening yourself up is a lot like hopping in front of a firing squad and doing your best impression of the Pennywise dance, knowing damn well that they’re probably going to shoot you in the face. Yet you dance every time. Grinning in the face of a bullet.
I wrote a film, The Fregoli Project, about a white liberal that can’t tell his black employees apart. In retrospect I would’ve done a lot different, and probably would’ve taken more advice from the eyes I let read over it. It was especially hard not having complete creative control over something I’d written 5 drafts of, but it tested me in ways I would’ve never opened myself up to other wise. When the film played at the Texas Theater, it brought me joy to hear people snorkeling in the audience at something I’d wrote. Something that had made a life of its own.
There’s something that’s both unsettling and yet completely gratifying about existing outside of certain structures. You compare yourself to those that you idolize, because you need some semblance of a path, an endgame to look forward to. But it never comes. Instead, what you get is a perpetual struggle. A struggle signaling phantom progress, unseen but acknowledged on some plane other than this one. You learn that forward motion is an act of faith. Not something that can be ground down to metrics and competitive standards.
And then came August.
I had overcome the wall, and what lie before me was a decision.
The path ahead was two fold. The first, looked similar to what had come before. It gave the promise of redemption, and the threat of safety. The chance to do it all over again, the right way this time.
The other, was something else in its entirety. It spoke of uncertainty and invoked feelings of madness. The promise of nothing and the possibility of everything. The chance to do anything the wrong way.
I tried taking both, but the divergence between the two stretched me out so thin that it proved impossible to do. This was the moment, or one of a series of moments, that a person gets to define their own path in life. And so, after much deliberation, I made a definitive decision.
I dropped out of college. For good.
