Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!

Lately I have had this rock stuck between my heart and my chest, that has been pulling me apart, making me literally sore from the inside out with stress. I have been trying to figure out my financial situation for school, and it just makes me miserable. I won't go into the long and terrible two week journey, I would like to not relive the moments (especially as they have not ended yet).

I feel like I'm caught in one of those "pull yourself up by your bootstrap" movies. You know, the ones where Hispanic students stay after school to study with a devoted professor so that they can get a 30 on their ACTs, or one where inner-city African American ganstas with a softcore edge find meaning in poetry. Yet, very egotistically, I'm even more appalled at my own story, because I'm just James Pouliot, Midwester, small-town, white, boring me who colors in the lines and does what he is "suppose" to.

I have never before realized how much I take education for granted. And how spoiled and privledged I feel at expecting and demanding something like education. Similarily, I have never before realized how much our society puts pressure on people to do "the right thing" (aka, good job, have kids, go to school), and how at the same time it makes everything so difficult for us to achieve. Not everyone has parents that can cosign loans, or familys with money. The strange thing is, I do not feel bad for myself or like a victim at all. I have no reason to, I have a lot of luxuries that not everyone has. I'm not just talking about material luxuries. I'm talking about saftey, friends, love, etc. I don't think many people that don't have the luxury of education feel like they are victims either. Why should they, they only know the reality as told through their eyes. How is anyone suppose to know what is being taken from them if they can't see it, hold it, and use it?

I will graduate college, and I will be accepted into a graduate program without having to pay for school. I know this much because I have proven to be driven towards this goal. I'm very proud of what I have accomplished this past year, and know that I will continue to accomplish much more. I enjoy learning, and I enjoy school... despite the fact that I'm not a cheerleader. =)

Today, I was thinking about all of the other people that have a similar situation as me. We are not nearly as theatrical as being from inner city schools, or pulling our act togeter to perform well on an ACT. We are simple people that went through high school just as ignroant as anyone else, except when some people spent all day studying and getting straight A's, we worked at Taco Bell 20 plus hours a week, and skated by with B's. A path largely mitigated by family situation.

So now what? I pay for the rest of my life? I give in? I give up? I doubt it. But so many do, and I know can empatize more then I ever expected. The same people that went through community college with me that will never get a bachellors degree. I STRONGLY believe that these people contain the capacity that anyone else has, (I don't consider myself a savont by any means) and are unfortunate in the aspect that they didn't have the skin to wheather the storm when it got rough. Although I have very little going for me in the way of money, I learned some valuable lessons that have made me so strong, that I manage to continue on. Espeically from my mother. What it means to NOT get your degree. To get stuck in a marriage, and stuck in a divorce, to find yourself battling your own demons, and trying to get through school. No thank you, not for me. I'm too selfish, I want this too bad. It's now or never.

Why is this? Why does society hold back the people that need an education so badly? I strongly believe that the only way to end a cycle of poverty, depression, repression... is through education. Why make it hardest on the ones that need it the most? I just don't get it.

The other day I watched a documentary on Children of Appalachia, and the squalor and depression that they live in. Why do people not care about ending cycles? I think it's because we are all so consumed on making sure we are on the right side of the cycle, and who can blame us? Isn't that what I'm trying to do? Hopefully, I will be able to see this blog when I'm on the other side of the cycle. I hope. Hopefully I will think about that the next time I go on a rant about how other people don't work for "it". It really makes me think about how deep things truly go, although I tend to only look at the surface.