There was a core course for my major that I needed in college, communications theory, but the way it was scheduled in the night program the prerequisite always came after. I finally had no choice but to take the course without the prerequisite or wait another year, because there was nothing else offered at night that would keep me at the minimum full-time load, I'd already taken all of my electives. I was never going to graduate if I didn't take the risk.
The first night of class, the professor followed me outside during the break and pulled me aside. He said, "I saw your transcript and I see you're used to making A's, but I have to tell you, without the prerequisite, you'll be lucky to make a C." He said it in a really condescending, fake-caring, authoritarian way. It was an attack.
I'm 5'3". He was over 6'. I was in my mid-twenties, with some life experience yet also somewhat naive and too open, and looked younger than my years. He was in his late fifties to early sixties, tenured, experienced, and in a position of power in the department. It was very much a David and Goliath moment.
I started to shake a bit, and even more so after I declined to drop and he walked away, the covert assault over and my adrenaline flooding, but what rose up inside almost immediately after that first weakening blow, while he was in front of me, when classmates were watching and listening, was, Aw hell no.
Among the other students, there was a silent, collective, "Oh fuck." Many came up to me after, both that night and in the following weeks, shocked at how he'd acted, shocked at me holding my ground. Some said fuck him, some said they would have never been able to handle it and would've dropped.
He'd thrown down a gauntlet and for a while we were like adversaries watching each other from opposite sides of the ring, sizing each other up, preparing for battle. And the whole class was watching.
I ended up being the top student in the class. Communication theory was not that hard. (And the next quarter I learned the prerequisite had nothing to do with theory at all. I don't ever remember what it was, it was that irrelevant.)
Halfway through the quarter, after being highly engaged in class and then blowing away the midterm, he admitted he was wrong and started showing me respect, something shifted, and we ended up being buddies for the rest of the term. The spectators were shocked at the shift. Afterward, he was one of the professors I went to whenever I needed references, and they were always glowing.
Had I crumbled and dropped, it would have really fucked things up for me. It would have taken even longer to graduate, and it already took eight years as I worked full-time throughout college, and at one point took an opportunity to work at night so that I could finally take some day courses and finish, because the school really didn't care about night students.
@FireFox, I think at some point you need to connect with your self-respect, your self-worth, and your Aw hell no. Or you can remain crumbled and feel like everything is hopeless and out of reach and you'll never finish. You still may finish, but the way you feel about yourself, people in positions of authority and even men you'd want to date and start a family with are going to see that you're beaten down, that you won't say Aw hell no, and beat you down further for their own amusement or fulfillment. You posted yesterday that life is hard and you don't have the strength. Yes, @FireFox, life is fucking goddamned hard. You may get twenty years down the road and feel empowered in spite of how hard life is, or you may feel like you would have been better to have ended your life in your early twenties. Either one is okay. Life is fucking brutal, sometimes with reprieves, sometimes with high moments. It's your choice what to do with that knowledge, and there is no wrong choice. You may fight and not win; as Samuel Johnson said, winning is best, but when you can't win, then second-best is knowing you were worthy to win. Either way, that's self-respect, it's something one has to work to achieve and/or work to maintain, and without it, life is even harder. It's lying on the bed, not for rest or recovery, but as an invalid at the level of the spirit.
You posted yesterday that your reason for ctb'ing is not knowing your purpose. All living beings have to toil to survive, that is the purpose. It sucks. Any higher purpose is new age and self-help social engineering opiate bullshit. Along the way you may discover a fulfilling purpose in what you do, or you may get fed up and make your own purpose. You may repeatedly fail and not find success until you're in you're sixties like Colonel Sanders. You may find it earlier, you may never find it. You may find that success is not what the world says it is, which is always fragile, fleeting, and causes desperate clinging (and already you are desperate for it), but instead that it is something that arises from within, almost always from challenge and adversity. If you keep giving yourself permission to wallow full-time, guess what? That is your purpose, and I've seen plenty of people who do it for the rest of their lives. Like my grandmother, the queen of the whiners and guilt-trippers, they are a drain to everyone around them yet get no power from what they drain, they are the most piteous waifs, their spirits languish, they are internal invalids, they never connect with the power of their unique life forces, and goddamn if they don't outlast everyone, in spite of being helpless and incapable, and in spite of wanting to die.
