I’m making a decision. Well, to be fair I made the decision years ago but I’m finally acting on it. Let me explain.
In 2008 I decided to return to college and get a degree in marketing and what I told people at the time was that I wanted to work in marketing, but that wasn’t exactly true. In 2012, I continued on and pursued a masters and said it was to increase my storytelling ability. That was mostly true but raising my GPA was the real goal. Why would I pursue one degree and then second in under in 5 years just to raise my GPA? law school.
I’ve been interested in law school for a long time. How long? As long as I can remember but I didn’t really consider it a possibility until after Hurricane Katrina. In the same way the storm knocked down buildings and walls and swept them away in the floodwaters that followed, the storm did the same to mental blocks in my mind. It made me realize how short life was and it galvanized the fact that we are not guaranteed tomorrow. Every day I get one day closer to my last and if my dreams are to happen it’s up to me to make them happen and to pursue them without hesitation.
With that mindset, I’m moving forward with plans to attend law school in the Fall of 2017. It’s taken me a decade to lay the groundwork to make this possible and now I can finally see the path. I’m sure this path will be winding and a full of potholes but I’m a lot closer than I was in 2005.
I feel I need to metion something here. The path to law school is not going to be easy and I’m well aware of this, but to even be considering it with my background and where I came from it’s amazing that I’m even here. I grew up poor. Not dirt poor and living on the streets but my parents didn’t go to college. My dad never went beyond the ninth grade and his mother had a fourth grade education.
I myself dropped out of school in ninth grade and seem destined to repeat the family cycle but something in me was different. I passed the GED test at 16 and started on a path of lifelong learning. I lived in the library; both the public library and the unversity library that was a short bike ride from my home. In addition to a voracious reading habit I started to obsessively watch educational programming on TV. The Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel were chock full of educational programming when I was a teen and I watched thousands of hours of their content. It’s a far cry from the crap those same channels carry today. To this day, I prefer a good documentary over a movie and I love to watch to learn and oppose to watch to be entertained.
I’m going to chronicle the law school process and my experience as I go through it. I’m also going to be blogging here daily. Why? To improve my writing, to organize my thoughts, and maybe to have a record of this experience of this for myself and my kids as time goes on.
Sometimes as we get further from the experience we forget the challenge and the difficult moments. The euphoria experienced at the summit of achievement have a way of making us forget how truly challenging it was to reach that summit. I don’t want to forget and I don’t want my kids to think it was easy.
Hopefully, a law degree leads to a better version of the American dream for my family, but I don’t want my kids to see new cars and a big home in an upscale neighborhood and think it was easy. Or think it was always this way because it wasn’t. I want them to understand the journey and respect how truly difficult it was to get there.
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