Homecoming

When I was 17 I ran away from home after a huge fight with my parents.

It was the middle of college application season and I hated it. I hated the pageantry, the constant buzz of high school test taking and grades. The pressure and difficulty of memorizing inane facts on few hours of sleep.

My folks didn’t see much of me anyways. I would wake up for school at 6:00a, be in class by 7:20a, sleep through first period (history was always easy), have class until 2:30p, do the 10 different club afterschool activities I had going on to bump up my attractiveness for colleges, pop over to a sports practice which didn’t let out until dinner, get something calorically-dense, then practice with my band until 10:00p, head home to crank out some homework, sleep at 2:00a, then start it all over. I was a walking zombie, and the only thing that was keeping me performing at a high level was fear, shame and peer pressure to follow through on assignments.

Always the overachiever when I was younger, I canvassed my options and found a few different options that might make the next four years bearable. My family attended an interest session for Brown University at a fancy library. There the recruiter told us going to Brown was like “driving a Lexus off a cliff every year.”

I applied for 10 different schools, Brown being one of them. But I don’t come from money, so really there was only whatever option gave me the most financial aid. Which when I talked to my parents really meant that I could only go to the two in-state schools I applied to: VCU or Virginia Tech. It’s sad and funny how money problems only tend to come out at the worst moments.

Call me spoiled or idiotic but I felt like I was learning nonsense in school and had found much more solace in lessons from books and the world. I knew that I would not find real education in a classroom. There was so much more that I was curious about, so much more that I wanted to create. I wanted to apprentice under someone, I was just looking to experiment to figure out with who and where.

I told my parents I didn’t want to go to college.

They told me I had to go. That because I was underage, they would make me go. That I didn’t have a choice.

It was one of the worst fights I’d ever had with them. Screaming and crying and slammed doors and all of that. Words that couldn’t be taken back. I ran away from home.

I lived on couches for a week, one time sleeping in the car with my friends keeping me company. It was late fall in Virginia and it was cold. My mom threatened to call the cops on me for taking the car so I dropped our Buick off so she’d leave me alone.

Nobody really knew this was going on except those that were closest to me. I remember the feeling of being trapped, of looking ahead to a future of being stuck consistently doing things I didn’t want to, of a life lived in the service of others’ wishes, a slave to the whims of societal niceties.

I took a walk with a friend during this time along the banks of Barcroft and wondered aloud at how we merely go to school to get a good job to get married have kids then die. I had realized I was on a womb to tomb treadmill with no way off. His advice? “You’ve only got a few months left of listening to your parents then once you’re in school you can do what you want.” Those words rang so empty to me because I felt like I could already see ahead.

The unflinching, unthinking , uncaring world does not take kindly to those that want to follow a different path. The nihilistic reckoning that I was going through felt like there was no way to resist the Lovecraftian forces arranged against me. The banal plodding evil of the education system was pushing me down the conveyer belt into a predetermined outcome. There was no escape except to turn on, tune in, and drop out.

I stopped sending in assignments. I stopped meeting deadlines. I stopped pushing for excellence and merely settled at “good enough.” The world around me started pummeling me for breaking from the norm, the straight A student, the golden child. My biology professor, the one who supported my dreams of biotechnology, called me out for making mistakes and missing deadlines. My math teacher made excuses for me to ensure that I didn’t completely drop out. At the time I told them it was senioritis because I didn’t know how to communicate the underlying feelings.

I lost all motivation. I nearly lost the will to live. I was disheartened and broken by the seeming emptiness of it all.

I had come to the realization that the fear of falling behind on the treadmill of life was what had motivated me so far. The fear of getting a bad grade, which meant that I wouldn’t get into college, that I’d wind up without a job, homeless and disheveled and alone dying on the street.

How insane that this is what we make children experience at a key point in life. That we push down natural curiosity, creative inclinations and spirit to mold young minds into wage slaves shackled to debt. As Matt Crawford writes in Shop Class as Soulcraft: “Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.” I was curious, I wanted to know how everything around me worked. When I peaked under the hood of education, I became disenchanted with no way out.

I was like a drowning man looking for a motivational life raft, choking on pointlessness, consigning myself to following in the footsteps of people who never dared to dream and just accepted the path laid out for them.

My mother wanted to be a dentist like her father, but my grandfather told her women could only be oral hygienists and that he wouldn’t pay for her schooling. She was the oldest child and moved back after school to take care of him when he had an open heart surgery. That sense of duty kept her sacrificing her own dreams for others, including for my father. She had to get away and moved to Texas after a few years just to get enough distance to start making a life for herself again.

My dad followed what his father wanted for him. My grandfather was a German immigrant hardened by the war, by his own father being a university professor in Heidelberg, by the constant churn of hard work at contractor jobs for little pay. My father got as much education as possible, but when he went to California to get set up for a PhD, he washed out. He never talks about what happened, but he wound up back at his parent’s place recovering, before getting a job in Texas where he met my mom.

Both replaying their own past traumas on their children. Emphasizing duty to the predetermined social outcomes of what constitutes a “good life” and ignoring the intrinsic desires that I was attempting to speak aloud. More education obviously is an inherent good right?

So I went off to school, still struggling with the challenge of figuring out why anything I did mattered. Needless to say, college was hard. I consistently wanted to wash out, to find my own way, but got stuck in the path laid out for me. Just a year in, I had already completed the pre-requisites and was sticking around because I “might as well finish the degree” — AKA sunk cost fallacy writ large.

Experimenting with entrepreneurship was a way out. As Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Creating new systems was a means of rediscovering myself, of building things that I could find pride in, of getting creative with constraints and barriers.

Pride is the key word here. To say pride is a sin is to ignore the benefits of creation. To be proud of something outside of yourself is to acknowledge the effort in shaping the immaterial into reality. I now consistently seek out ways to create things that I can be proud of, that I can stand behind.

I think I’m still trying to figure the motivation part out. It’s easy to remain a cynic, nihilist, pessimist. It’s easy to see abject failure in every outcome. Some days are better than others. On the darkest + dreariest days I’ve starting pointing myself at a new north star.

I devour science fiction. For the longest time I wondered why I resonated so much with the themes I read about in stories.

I want to make science fiction.

why

why why

There’s this philosophy