Take 6? (I’ve lost count)
It looks like I’m going to take yet another kick at the ball that keeps being pulled away at the last minute. The difference being in this situation, I’m kicking more for the appearance of going through the motions than any real desire to for the piece of paper. I’m getting ahead of myself again though.
Let me explain. I’ve been attempting to finish a BA, major in English (that most lowly and common of degrees), for coming on to ten years now. Besides the absurdity of that, what rankles even more is that the difficulty of completing it is easily within the reach of a monkey. A pathological intolerance to criticism has been growing since early grade school to the point where I cannot even complete a paragraph after an hour’s time when writing an essay. I overthink everything to the point of it being inferior to the product of just spilling out whatever is on my mind on the topic in ten or fifteen minutes. So, since 2004, I’ve been two courses short of finishing my degree, and try as I might, I just can’t complete them. It’s like some sort of monolithic curse has fallen upon me, so ridiculous and unrelenting are its effects.
There are several reasons for this: emotionally distant and controlling mother, lack of peer friendships/support, Asperger traits intermixing with, and depression from, aforementioned, etc. I was actually surprised, despite the horrific outcome, at the change in and disappearance of symptoms on my brief stay at the notorious AS residential program (while an organization might be corrupt, it is simplistic to paint every member of it with the same brush. There were individuals there who did show a genuine sense of caring that is so completely alien to me). It should also be noted that previous forays away from this environment, while nominally successful, still had me standing on the fringes and feeling forlorn. What was different this time was a few people demonstrating human interest. So, moving forward, in trying to create an artificial environment for success, those two components (separation from current environs and a person/people with empathy) are required.
