So the original plan was to start with a few stories. You know, get whoever might be reading this up to speed on who I am (and was) and who some of the other characters in this narrative might be. After wards, I was going to write a single entry on what I might call “the bad thing that happened” so that this trip I'm going on would all make some kind of sense.
Well that plan fell apart. Turns out that if I ever want to get any sort of lengthy back story in place, I might have to do it after the fact. I want to write some things down here and its hard enough to get it out without putting all the back story in place first. So this entry is going to be as short as I can make it (you might call it the back story cliff notes). It's going to be a long post, though, non-the-less.
So lets get started:
THE BAD YEARS, THE CLIFFS NOTES:
A note: This is not so bad as many of the bad things that have happened to other people. I acknowledge this. Never-the-less it messed me up a touch. Messed me up worse than anything else I've had to deal with, in fact, and that includes what happened to my brothers. What happened to them was due to bad choices that they made. What happened to me was due mainly to a bad choice that I made. Therein lies the difference.
Another note: What I am about to write, in truth, amounts to little more than a long complaint against my parents that spans nearly two decades of time. I'm pretty sure that writing this makes me a bad person. I should have at least started with a long list of all the ways they were good parents. Complaints should be kept to a minimum if possible, but I aim to work this thing through, and if that means making me sound like the sort who lives just to cry and complain about things, so be it. So there you have it reader. You've been warned. I don't blame you if you want to skip this post.
Spring of 2002, just after High School:
Mom says “go to college”.
I say “I don't want to end up a slave to a huge debt”.
Mom says “that won't happen”.
I say “I don't even know what degree I would want to get”.
Dad says “It doesn't matter what degree you get, it only matters that you get a degree”.
Turns out my fears were more than justified. It does matter what degree you get and you have to be really, really careful or you are going to end up a slave to your massive debt. All through my teenage years, I listened to my folks. I assumed they knew what they were talking about. A lot of people say they didn't listen to their folks and wish they had. In this case I listened to my folks and really wished I hadn't.
The (unfortunate) Results as I See Them:
Now-a-days I don't listen so well as I used to. I can trust people to have my best intentions at heart (cause a lot of them do), but I have a lot of trouble trusting that people know what the hell they are talking about. I now operate under the assumption that if my opinion is different in any significant way from another person, I am probably right and they are probably wrong. This has proven to be the case again and again, reinforcing my notion that I am nearly always right. In fact, the more that I ignore the advice of others and do what the hell I think is right, the better things tend to turn out. One day, this insufferable arrogance is likely going to come back and bite me so hard that it might kill me. It hasn't happened yet, though.
Spring of 2007, just after College:
Mom says “Tom, its been two months since you graduated. I think its time for you to start paying back what you borrowed from the farm.”
What Tom should have said: “No way. You told me that I wouldn't have this massive debt at all, and now I have more than just the farm to pay back. Besides, you're the one who worked so hard to talk me into going in the first place. I mean come on, you even offered at one point to pay for the entire thing yourself, you wanted to see me go so badly, and now here you are asking me for the money? It's not your fault that the economy just took a major dive, but it isn't my fault either, so I think you can just hold your tongue and wait your turn.”
What Tom did say: “Okay. Fine.”
The (unfortunate) Results as I See Them:
I used every cent I made the next year to pay the farm back completely. I lived off of credit. Once the farm was payed back, I decided to work extra hard to make up for the year's worth of growing debt from the interest on the college loans and credit cards I was now failing to pay off. Unfortunately, I was working for the farm at the time (I'd been working there since I was ten, and had never worked anywhere else).
The Fight of the Winter of 2007:
Dad and I never fought so hard, before or since, as the fight we had when he told me to stop working so hard. I'm ashamed of all the things I called him, and I got so angry I think I would have tried to hurt him and hurt him badly if he had tried to physically restrain me from finishing the job I was doing.
When he told me the work I was doing to try to clean up and fix up the animal pens “wasn't a priority” I let him have an angry tirade of hellfire, threats, and admonishments stemming all the way back to the winter of '94. You see, my ten year old self had always assumed that the unsatisfactory animal housing conditions were a result of an unfortunate lack of money or manpower. My ten year old self was, in fact, upset at the chapped, bleeding hands, and the raw cold, and the wallowing in the shit and snowdrifts, and the gloves and boots full of holes, and all the rest of what he had to put up with that winter. (Seriously Dad, you could have at least bought me a pair of thermal underwear. It was cold out there.) My ten year old self was proud though, because he was doing an important job and there was clearly no one else who could spare the time and energy to help even though they surely wanted to. My ten year old self was just a scrawny little thing that couldn't carry the water buckets very well, but he did his best even though he kept slopping the water down his boots and wasn't able to work fast enough to get everything fed before dark.
When my 23 year old self heard that it wasn't a lack of manpower or money, just the fact that it was a low priority job you could pawn off on a ten year old, he took it very, very poorly. That wasn't what Dad said, mind you. He just said it “wasn't a priority”.
The (unfortunate) Results as I See Them:
I left the farm, and spent a year (2008) looking for work with a huge debt on my shoulders, a BA that was mostly useless, and absolutely no experience on how one even goes about finding work. I lived on the couches of friends, bought my meals, gas, and auto repairs with what credit I had left, found no work, and bit by bit slipped further and further into debt. (Special thanks to Sara Fitzsimmons for finally giving me a chance that summer to work for The American Chestnut Foundation. I know it was just minimum wage grunt work, but I was thankful to have it. Thanks also to my Grandfather, Jadek. I know those three months you let me live with you while I was doing the job Sara gave me were rough on you. I wasn't in a good place, I know you could tell, and I know it hurt you not being able to help me more than you did.) As it fell, The longer I struggled to pay for what my monetarily impotent college degree cost me, the more the resentment and anger towards my folks built and built. Finally, it got so bad I told them everything I've just written above. I'm not sure I explained it correctly, though. To this day I'm still not sure if they understand why I got so angry.
2009, 2010, and early 2011:
I went back to school. No one wanted to hire a guy with a BA in Environmental Studies so I decided I would be the guy with the BS in Mathematics. The Teach for America Website said that they were desperate for math teachers, and I was going to get a good job, damn-it, and get out of my shackles. My folks, seeing that I was in a bad way, offered to help me. They're good folks, despite the fights we had, and they really didn't have a reason to help me go through college another time after how much I resented them for my first time through. I took their help because I needed it and didn't have anywhere else to turn. I had been telling myself since early 2007 that I would never trust any money the folks lent me ever again, and that I would never be a dime's worth in debt to them again. Turns out I was lying to myself. They offered me another loan for college and I took it.
What followed was two years of pretty fair hell. I was going to have to do the entire four year math degree in 2 year's time because after that the government wasn't going to lend me any more money. After all, my folks couldn't afford to loan me everything I needed a semester all on their own, even though I was in such bad shape that I think they would have tried. In fact, I'm still not sure where the money they did lend to me came from those two years. The economy was still in really bad shape, then, and the farm wasn't bringing in much cash. Looking back, I'm thinking a lot of it was probably the blood money the marine corps gave them after Sam died.
I was determined. I took 16 credits a semester of nothing but upper level math courses. 16 credits was nothing compared to what I had taken per semester in my first four years, but 16 credits a semester of straight calculus and physics was a different game entirely. I should mention they were calculus courses I didn't have the prerequisites for. I didn't have time for the pre-reqs. So I found a loop-hole; a hack of sorts in the online class registration that would allow me to sign up for classes I had no business being in. I ate little and slept less. My face got thin, and my eyes got hollow. My left arm developed a twitch that acted up during quizzes and exams. I juggled workloads and started performing triage on my grades. I worked out which tests I could afford to fail and let those tests slide so that I could do the work for the classes that I couldn't afford to let slide anymore.
The first semester, all of my teachers and advisers tried to talk me out of what I was doing. “You can't pass these classes,” they'd say, “You shouldn't even be in them.” But I ignored them. I had decided that it was often best to assume people giving me advice didn't know what they were talking about. And I did pass those courses. After that, during the last three semesters, my teachers and advisers were rooting for me every step. They went out of their way to help me. I shouldn't have been able to, but I passed each and every course on the first go round. I had to, although I'm pretty sure that one of my professors bumped my grade in one class from a 69% to a 70% out of sheer pity.
It became hard to go to sleep and harder to wake up. My concentration was shot, and I remember always being hungry. I lost over 10% of my body weight in all. Not a bad thing for some people, but I was a thin man to begin with.
I graduated college for the second time in December of 2010. They let me carry a flag during the ceremony. I was finally on my way to fixing the mistake I had made 8 years earlier when I went to college the first time. I finally had a degree that would get me a job. Only problem was: it didn't.
Teach for America didn't want me.
I kept applying for teaching gigs and finally The New Teacher Project gave me a few interviews. They offered me a job teaching inter city schools in Baltimore. I accepted. They gave me a ton of paper work to fill out in the spring and summer of 2011 and brought me in for a 6 week training session around the last week of June. I was to start that August as a math teacher. That August I was to start, finally, to repay the debt; a debt that was twice as large now, as it had been in 2006. Things were going smoothly until they gave me a particular assignment. I was to write a three page paper on why I agreed with an article entitled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. Search for it. Look it up. Don't take my word for it. It's an article that will tell you that all white men are privileged and that every one else is not. I read it. I wrote my paper. I agreed that many white men (myself among them) had advantages. I agreed that many said individuals were not conscious of it. I agreed that many non-white, non-male people did not have these advantages. Then I said that that I disagreed with some points. I said that many of the things the article was calling unearned privileges unfairly given to many white males, I would call basic rights unfairly denied to many women and minorities. I also went on to say that it was a basic logical error to say that “all” white men where advantaged and that “all” other people were not. You can say “most” and argue it successfully. But you cannot say “all”.
They told me to either
rewrite the paper agreeing with every single point of the article or
leave. In addition they said they would require another paper
apologizing for how I had “failed to maximize my time with them.”
I left. I needed the money badly, but I wasn't quite ready to start
selling my convictions.
I was right in ignoring
the advice of my advisers, reinforcing my belief that the people who
I am supposed to rely on for advice usually should have their advice
ignored. In fact, the only class I nearly failed due to being truly
unprepared was a class specifically recommended to me by my adviser
as one I 'did' have the prerequisites for. Despite what they
thought, I could handle things, but it would have been easier if,
during a period of limited time and energy, I didn't have to spend
the time and energy outsmarting the system. In the end, however,
ignoring the rules won me both their respect and their aid. The
Lesson Learned: Breaking the rules often works better than following
them, and it's a lot easier to break them if you do it when no one is
looking.
I also learned that any
employer paying you will use that money as both threat and leverage
to try to change your beliefs or make you sign your name to
statements you do not believe in. The example with the article was
the most grievous instance of this, but the nature of the
brainwashing and conditioning The New Teacher Project was attempting
would have been readily apparent to anyone who has ever taken even a
rudimentary psychology course. The Lesson Learned: Unless your boss
is Sara Fitzsimmons, you probably shouldn't trust him/her.
I went back to the farm. I spent a few weeks and applied for a few more jobs here and there. I got rejected from anything worth doing.
Mom said: “Just keep trying. Everything will work out fine.”
I lost it. I know she meant well, but all I heard was “You just haven't tried hard enough, yet.”
Dad had apologized for the mistaken advice he had given me about college, but mom never had (and still hasn't) admitted that the financial advice she saddled me with was not only incorrect but disastrously wrong. Half a decade's worth of stress and poor sleep, and the best she could say to me was “I am sorry you made a decision that has made you so unhappy.” That decision, in truth, was mine to make. But the unhappy decision my 17 year old self had so mistakenly made was to listen to her.
I was tired. I was angry. I had been tired and angry for years. I told her off so thoroughly and completely that it's a wonder she still speaks to me at all.
Then I gave up.
For the first time in my life, I completely and utterly gave up. I stopped looking for work. I stopped paying the loans. I stopped answering the calls from the student loan organizations. I stopped talking to friends. I stopped talking to family.
I slept in the attic of the farm house and I ate whatever food was put in from of me. Other than that, I did nothing. I was down and out this way for two weeks.
I figured that it was only a matter of time before the folks told me to leave. I figured when they did, I would walk into the woods and survive as well as I could. That might sound like a load of bullshit to most people, but those of you who know me, know I would have done it.
But they didn't ask me to leave. Instead, they offered to pay off my loans. Just like that. Somewhere late that summer, Dad told me he would make things right again. This put a spark back into me.
With the spark came the guilt. Hard work and determination counted for nothing, whereas anger, disrespect, and sloth gave immediate reward. I couldn't stand it, so I left the farm again.
I lived in a friend's spare room, payed her a little bit of rent, and I worked a few odd jobs here and there (having finally learned the art of finding odd jobs.) I did some factory work that was not worth doing. I worked as a roustabout some, putting up large tents for special events, and once or twice I spent a few days helping the Sheetz company unload tractor trailers. This lasted a few months while I tried to get my head on straight.
I didn't want 'giving up' to be the solution to my problems, but working hard had certainly never produced anything for me. So in the end I took Dad's offer, and I went home. I think this was in late September but might have been October or even November. It's blurry.
So I came home, and I slept. For months and months, I just slept. I tried working a little bit on the farm, but my head was full of voices that wouldn't be quiet. Too many fears and suspicions about all the bad things that happen when you apply yourself to anything. I was still cold towards mom, if no longer openly hostile. I kept expecting to be told to leave. I kept expecting the offer to be withdrawn and the promise broken. Within a few months, though, Dad refinanced some things, and in March of 2012, he just cleared away tens of thousands of dollars of my college debt. Just like that.
The (unfortunate) Results as I See Them:
Years of hard work, determination, and skill earned me nothing. In fact, the harder I tried, the worse my situation became.
When, in 2007, I tried to work hard to make the farm better and to pay off my loans, Dad fought to make me stop and mom demanded money she had promised she wouldn't demand.
When I tried to work hard to get a degree that would matter, the university itself tried to stop me, and only started helping me when I hacked the system and stubbornly ignored everyone I should have been listening to.
When I stuck to my guns about the unfortunate connotations of a paper about why “all” of any type of person is privileged and “all” of any type of person is not, it only served to get me fired.
Giving up completely, though; utterly ceasing to work, care, or try make things better...set me free. What's more, it set me free in a matter of months when I had spent years trying to do what was right. This is a bad lesson for anyone to learn.
After March of 2012 and into 2013.
Once Dad lifted the loans, things began to get better. I still didn't bother to look for work or help at the farm much, but I started selling my time to people I knew who were having trouble with math and physics. I began tutoring family, friends, and friends of friends who could spare some cash and felt I was doing them good by showing them how to sort the numbers. I didn't expect it to generate much income, but I no longer needed much income. For six years, all I had wanted was to claw my way back up to where I was when I had first graduated high school, and now I was there.
I had done a lot of tutoring over the years for food or for free, and someone suggested I do a bit of it for money. Turned out that once people were paying me, they felt a lot less guilty about asking for help. My schedule slowly started filling up. Word got around, and within a year, I was making more per week tutoring than I would have made at any job I had ever even applied for, much less gotten. My clients tell me I charge half what other math and physics tutors charge. I didn't believe them until I looked it up. When I started doing all my tutoring online, things got even better. I no longer had gas as an expense, and I could tutor anyone anywhere. My last client was in Puerto Rico, and he heard about me through word of mouth.
I was still at the farm. My relationship with Mom patched up slowly. Rather than talk about it, she seemed content to pretend that nothing had ever been wrong to begin with. Less closure this way, but less fighting too, I suppose.
And that brings us pretty nearly up to date. I've spent the last year or so patching up things that fell apart or had been neglected during the last half-decade or so. I went back and thanked my professors. I used the money from the tutoring to clear out my last few thousand dollars of debt from, among other things, my credit cards, an old utility bill, and a really understanding landlord who never got the last month's rent. I sent a Christmas present to my one cousin that was quite some years overdue.
Mom does little kindnesses for me each day, and I have taken to building her walk-ways and grape arbors; rebuilding chicken coups and fixing leaky pipes. I did a lot of cooking while she was away for part of each week pursuing her own college education. Just little things, I know, but the little things seem like they really matter.
Despite how well the tutoring was (and is) going. I took three months off this last spring to help Dad and Joe with the planting. I hadn't done it last spring, but this one felt different. I didn't have those voices in my head echoing over and over “How are you gonna get free? How are you gonna get free?” You can't sit in a tractor cab for hours on end with nothing but your thoughts, not when your thoughts are tearing you up. The three of us planted more acreage this past spring than any spring in over a decade. It's all growing well.
I still don't feel comfortable enough to go back to work for Dad with the animals on a regular basis. I help whenever we are improving the facilities though; building new calf nurseries and such. Ever since Dad and my big fight in 2007, he's seen to it that the conditions and facilities for the animals have been steadily improving. The animals, in general, look pretty good now, and within another year or two the facilities might actually be up to where they should have been 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure Joe has had a big hand in all this. He keeps things clean.
The (fortunate?) Results as I see Them.
My face is no longer thin, my arm doesn’t twitch anymore, and the claustrophobic nightmares have all but disappeared.
I've been trying to make amends to my folks bit by bit for my anger and my coldness.
I work for myself, and I love my job.
There is still a lingering fear or two that haunt me, though. If I hadn't broken down, I would still be struggling to get free. I wouldn't have thought to try the tutoring. I would still be scrapping the bottom of the job market for work I didn't really want for money that just gets passed on to pay the interest. Debt, as I had long suspected, is a walking prison. Beyond that, I can't shake a lingering feeling that, despite their repeated assurances, one day my folks will come asking for the money again; forcing me to fall back into either defensive anger or wage-slavery.
I need to let it go. If I ever get a windfall, I'll pay the folks back, but only on my terms and only in my time. This was the original bargain I had with them, and, after what has happened, I think they'll stick to it this time. I still have my fears, but I aim to walk it off.
My folks did wrong by me when I was doing right by them, and they treated me with incredible amounts of help and kindness once I no longer deserved it. I feel a weird mix of anger and confusion over this, as well as guilt and shame. But that's another thing I need to let go. I aim to walk that off, too.
When I was 18 and just out of high school I told myself that I was going to go on an adventure. I had read too much Tolkien in elementary school, I suppose, and I had been itching for a long walk ever since. I agreed to put it off for four more years. 22 didn't seem that far away to me, and the folks really wanted to see me go to college. I am 29 years old, now. This whole thing is 7 years past due. So in my selfishness, I have told my father I won't be around to help with the fall harvest. I have told my tutoring clients that they are going to have to get by without me between now and next spring.
I am going very, very far away, and then I am coming home bit by bit. When I get back, I am not going to be angry or guilty anymore. I am going to forget about the trapped feeling and the sleepless nights. I'm going to forget the injustices done to me and the pain and injustice I have inflicted in return. I aim to go walking.
I aim to walk it off.
Final Thoughts.
If you read it this far, good for you. I won't give you another post like this; I promise. A lot of you who know me were with me through bits and pieces of this narrative, and so a lot of you know that in the midst of all this life was going on: People got married, babies were born, suicides happened, hearts were broken, and people died. Not all of it was bad, and I had some good times. A lot of you who know me didn't see this story unwinding. You just knew something was wrong with me. Now you know what. Sorry I didn't tell you sooner.
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