Community College Chiron

Thinking in Circles and Squiggles

Community College Chiron Wisdom

As a review- Chiron is a minor planet representing our deepest wounds. These wounds may never heal… hopefully it won’t be this bloody, gaping, nasty thing… hopefully we are blessed with some forgiving scar tissue. At it’s best, Chiron can provide us with wisdom to share. A healing salve for ourselves and others. My Chiron is the sign of Gemini. A sign of the mind, ruled by Mercury, the planet of ideas and communication. Gemini is the natural ruler of the 3rd house- a house associated with early life education. So, here’s a doozie for ya. Let’s get in to my deepest insecurities and just live here for a minute.

I’m a wildly curious person. I love learning. Burrowing deep into stories about people, music, art… maybe science if the subject is something of interest… I love learning in the ways that nourish me and how I process. Fun size learning. Give me the tender meat, cut the fat. I take whatever information I can and digest it in an osmosis type of way. Having AuDHD sometimes feels like a gift because of the way I’m able to take a topic of interest and hyperfocus on it. Being a wildly curious, highly imaginative person with the gift of hyper focus has allowed me to recreate myself and live many different lives. I do consider this a gift. But this gift was given with the pricetag still on and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to fully scratch it off. 

What is this heafty price? The fear and loathing of formal, traditional education. I HATED school. I faked sick so much, my parents started making me go even when I was actually sick. The boy who cried wolf kind of situation. Once I was getting ready for school and actually puked all over my bedroom and my dad was all, “well, hurry up and clean it up before your ride gets here…” And as a parent, I totally get it. School provides structure, discipline, and a social setting for developing humans. But I really fucking hated it. The disgusting smell of cafeteria food seeping in to the hallways and classrooms. The flourescent over-head lighting. Those cramped ass tiny litte tesks that BARELY had enough room to house a notebook for note taking, much less my head for nap taking. I didn’t take much interest in any of the core subjects needed, other than English and History. Looking back now I know that is because I love stories and storytelling. Math and science classes had my permission to fuck all the way off. I studied the back of my classmate’s heads so intensly in those classes. Point made, yes? If not, one more time for those in the back, I HATED SCHOOL.

I know now that I hated school so much because it was scary. It was over-stimulating. And I felt like I was always drowning in my learning attempts. I was an un-diagnosed ADHD baby girl just raw-dogging through it the best way I could. I was always losing homework or forgetting to complete assignments. In middle school we would get “push slips” if we didn’t complete our homework. I hated those things. We would have to bring them home and have our parents sign them, and the SHAME I felt and the knot that always formed in my throat and stomach come back just thinking about them. My parents were always cool, never made a big deal about it. But in my head push slips were the end all be all. They were this mean little reminder that I wasn’t keeping up, despite my valiant efforts. Same goes for failing tests. I did that a lot. Taking failed tests home for a parent signature was such a tail between the legs kind of situation. 

I really wanted to do well in school. My struggles didn’t stem from laziness. They stemmed from not understanding my brain. A teacher would say, “test tomorrow… study this..” and then I would go home, prepared to study and out of no where my brain would turn into a little dancing question mark. My eyes would dart around the math equations at hand and my mind would spin. It was so exhausting. I would often come home from school, eat like 5 bagels, then go up to my room and fall asleep for hours. At the time it felt like it was a depressive episode brought on by teenage hormones, but really it was my over/under-stimulated AuDHD teenage nervous system begging for a break and for someone to understand how to get through to us. 

Needless to say, colleges weren’t begging me to join. I fearfully applied to one college, and was surprisingly accepted. I had to complete Algebra 2 with a passing grade in order to attend college, and I’m fairly certain my teacher passed me out of pity. Regardless, I didn’t go to the university. I went to the community college in the neighboring town, and ultimately dropped out and moved back home with my parents, where I enrolled in our local community college, where I proceeded to drop out, yet again. 

I played this in and out game of community college for a couple of years. At one point I moved to the city my best friend was attending the state university and I enrolled at the community college in this town. I had so much fun living my best college girl life with her on the university's campus. I hung out with her and all the friends she had made at college and we had a ball. And while I was literally having the time of my life, I always had this crazy fear in the pit of my stomach that someone was going to call me out for not being a REAL college student. I was a COMMUNITY COLLEGE student who was fortunate enough to run with the elite university kids. Was it all in my head? Probably, at least for the most part. My girl was always very protective of me, she still is. I know had anyone ever said something belittling to me in her presence she would have had their ass. But it was still scary. It was still… sad. 

You’ll be shocked to learn that I dropped out of school, yet again. I was accepted to a very small university in Chicago and moved there in the summer of 2007. I maybe went to a total of 13 classes at that university before I decided to finally say, “fuck it.” and just roll around in my student-loan debt for the next 15 years. 

Why am I sharing all of this? I don’t know, honestly. It just feels good to get off my chest. I feel bad for all the honeys who thrive in the classroom and slay at community college only to be mocked by society for attending that house of learning. I actually loved the show “Community” starring Joel McHale, but the premise of mocking community college on such a public level always kinda irked me. I made so many self-deprecating jokes about myself in regards to where I was attending school simply to shield myself from what anyone else had to say. It was like that episode of Full House when Stephanie gets glasses and Joey coaches her to make fun of herself before anyone else can. I mean I know Joey was looking out for his girl and all, but damn. Looking back I wonder if I would have been more successful if I wasn’t so ashamed? Ultimately, I know I wasn’t cut out for formal education as a young blood, and that I did the best I could with what I was given. But the “what-ifs” still pop up now and again. What if someone would have nurtured and understood my brain in a way that made sense? What if I would have tried University right out of HS? What if I would have taken community college seriously? Where would I be? What would I be doing? Who would I be? My life would be so different. I can’t say better, but different. 

So in conclusion… everyone stop hating on community college. Stop mocking this higher learning staple. Stephanie, baby girl, you are a full slay in those glasses. Cafeteria workers, I know you are doing your best with the materials you are working with. I rest my case.