I hated high school and could not wait to be out. I'm sure others are in the same boat. I ended up teaching myself what I needed to know when I got to college. High School was when I realized that no one except me had my interests at heart.
If I could recreate the perfect experience for me in the past, it would have been to have had a way to get experience in journalism earlier. Sure, the profession was already dying, but I'd argue the world needs idiots like me who don't have anything better to do.
I think it's many people's experience if you weren't born into the system. Being a first generation American born into a family that didn't do much to assimilate means I'll die an outsider, too.
I then went to Virginia Tech, which was a waste of an experience where I learned how truly little I mattered. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Guidance counselors in high school thought I was just weird.
Again, I found my way through journalism, but the competition with the other newspaper was so cutthroat and they destroyed us. My entire life has been filled with people who cut my throat. I want to leave Charlottesville so much because even now I can feel the knives sharpening again.
My main point here is that formal education isn't for everyone. I would have loved a more vocational option for a blue-collar writing profession that doesn't exist anymore. Why has the profession completely die out? What's the future?
High school taught me well for a life that's been spent mostly alone. I was always the weird kid who wasn't quite anyone's friend. Now that my parents don't live nearby, I feel like there's no reason for me to be here in Virginia. Sure, you could argue the work I do, but couldn't I do that somewhere else? Is there still time for me to rescue this life, or am I condemned to continuously write on a landscape where there are so many actors who want the flash and not the substance?
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