Hello friends, welcome to The House of The Burning Prairie! I started this blog as a record of all our many messes and what we’re doing about them. There all kinds of messes: real, physical ones that you can step in, and less tangible ones that are even harder to clean up.

Today, on this second day of the new year, I took yet another step in cleaning up my longest-standing mess. I paid my tuition and bought my books for Spring Semester. You see, somehow I made it to 39 years of age without a bachelor’s degree. Call it a lack of focus, or a lack of support, whatever you call it, I never finished school. Oh, I have a ridiculous number of credit hours and have attended school off and on for the last 20-odd years at an embarrassing number of schools, I just never could push it over the edge and graduate.

I didn’t come from one of those families where getting a degree is just a given. “Of course you’ll go to college!” “Of course you’ll get your degree!” Never heard those things. And I am the all-time champ of “not living up to my potential”. These two factors make a perfect storm of not-finishing-college. Some people seem born knowing which directions their lives will take-doctor, architect, teacher… Not me. Was the problem, or at least part of it, that there were too many things that I wanted to do, or was capable of doing? I know that when I expressed interest in being a writer, my parents bought me a typewriter…so I could become a secretary when I couldn’t make a living as a writer. When I expressed interest in going into medicine, someone (you know who you are) said that I didn’t make good enough grades and that I should just “go to hair-school”. So I have to lay at least part of the blame at the doorstep of familial support issues. (disclaimer-I did not then and do not now think that going to cosmetology school is in any way “less than”, it was simply not for me.)

But even in environments where parents are totally unsupportive and even completely opposed to higher education, plenty of people buckle down and finish college. So I have to admit that the biggest contributor to this particular mess was definitely…..me. I could not make the decision, and therefore, the commitment to finish my degree. Finally, after years of feeling incomplete and buffeted about, I realized that it was the array of choices open to me that was literally freezing my decision-making processes. What I needed was a new process.

So, I came up with one. My new process helped me to narrow my choices and, thus, my focus. Using my process, I now have a degree goal and a way to achieve that goal. After figuring that out, I also realized that the process could help me with my other messes. But that’s a post for another day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 8:44 pm and is filed under Study, The Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.