The Lack of Purpose, Why I’m Grateful I Started College at 23
I never really imagined myself writing about my experiences as a 27-year-old postgraduate student who decided to start his college career at 23 years old.
Admittedly, most of my primary school education was not taken seriously by me and my friend group. Who could have guessed that a bunch of degenerate rednecks and long-haired suburban kids trying to form metal bands throughout the garages of sunny south Florida wouldn’t be heading to college?
For a younger me, school was just a means to an end that presented a list of possibilities, all of which did not include sitting my ass in front of teachers again for another four years. Gone were the days of analyzing Chaucer or finding the slope of some line graph that represented the strange number of avocadoes some kid in a textbook was buying. When 18-year-old me walked across the stage at my high school graduation, the piece of paper that was handed to me was the physical manifestation of freedom. No more school, life on my terms.
My next few years were spent a little different than most at that age. I moved wildly, hitchhiking through some states, staying longer in others. I held some good jobs and some bad jobs, and some illegal ones too. I was homeless, sometimes by choice sometimes by necessity. I was living life without a purpose for the first time since I was dropped off on my first day of kindergarten 1999.
One morning I woke in the parking lot of a mall that I would sleep at after a recent move to San Diego. While swiping through social media I had noticed that most of my feed was filled with kids from high school posting graduation photos in front of their college. After four years they had finally realized their dreams of becoming an engineer or teacher or marketer or whatever. I was jealous of those kids. They were graduating college and there I was, smashing the like the button on their posts while I was sweating in the back of my car, homeless again for ‘xth’ time.
The choices I had made for myself up to that point had broken the chains of a conventional lifestyle. I had lived life how I saw fit, even if it meant I had to live out of a car. But that's why I'm grateful.
I learned a lot about the world with no road map or plan of action. I went wherever and whenever with no proper sense of direction because I didn’t want to eat four years of my youth going to college as those kids did. It took me a while to understand that I was jealous of their sense of purpose, not their accomplishments.
Truth was, I was not ready for college right out of high school. I wasn’t mature enough and I had not formed my own opinions about the world around me to be thrusted into a position where I had to choose what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
We speak about finding purpose as if it was the Holy Grail. However, lacking purpose was the best thing that could’ve happened to me as a young adult. Having no sense of purpose allowed me the freedom and time I needed to figure out who I was.
By not pursuing college immediately after high school I was left to taking chances and being terrified while doing it. Striking it on my own and having to survive gave me the perspective I needed to pursue higher education on my terms. I had to find my sense of purpose.
I started college a month after my 23rd birthday. Now, at 27, I am about to begin my second semester for my master’s degree in Ireland.
