I Passed a Few Tests in My Time

and failed a couple too

I don’t talk a lot about my time at Auburn because there isn’t much to talk about unless you want to talk about how good I was at Call of Duty. I don’t talk about it a lot because my family has high standards of taking tests, making good grades, and being at the top of the class.

And I didn’t do that.

Well, at least kind of.

English and history and Matlab and math went alright, but chemistry…not so much.

The reason why may shock you.

Basically, I refused to do homework.

Okay, maybe that didn’t shock you, but let me explain. The homework was stupid.

Now are you with me?

Seriously, though, I would sit down to do the homework, and it would ask me a simple question. I’d answer it, but because I didn’t word it just right or mess up the sig figs, it would return an error and the number of questions would go to ten to twenty.

Then I’d be like, “yeah right, I’ll play some Modern Warfare 3 and play a few matches on Dome or Mission or something.”

Usually, I can procrastinate fairly well. Open up the assignment at the last second, power through, get a solid grade and call it a day. But with the way this homework worked, you couldn’t just fly through it because of the way it handled errors, so I got too far behind to zip through it…

Skipping homework made me feel embarrassed to go to class. Feeling too embarrassed to go to class led to me making up good reasons why I shouldn't. Like there was a guy who sat behind where I usually sat, and he would sniff loudly like every thirty seconds.

I’d be trying to take a test.

SNIFF

Trying to balance equations.

SNIFF

Looking up masses on the periodic table.

SNIFF

I deal with allergies, so I get it, but this was on another level. Just thinking about it now makes me irritated. lol

And one of the reasons I was irritated is because I knew I had it in me. Like, theoretically, I could do the work and understand the problems, but I wasn’t able to wing it like I typically could.

But there was something else going on in this time as well (you know, besides undiagnosed moderate clinical depression and severe anxiety).

I wasn’t just playing Call of Duty.

And I wasn’t just partying.

Actually, I overplay that last one more than I should for laughs. While I definitely did party in college, it was no where near enough to affect anything. I never missed a class, skipped homework, or anything like that because I was partying (or, more accurately, attending a party while playing beer pong with water, and doing magic tricks for drunk people).

But I was doing a lot of reading.

I felt compelled to save Auburn from the clutches of denominationalism and liberalism.

And boy did I come close.

Almost had ‘em.

I spent a lot of time studying the Holy Spirit, the book of Daniel, and a few niche issues in the church I was attending (great people, by the way).

But I was always trying to start up conversations with people in the religious organizations that passed out material on the concourse or students who were reading their Bibles before class. Real heathens.

And this study was the symptom of something stirring within me. I really wanted to be a preacher. I filled in a few times at a church near me down there and was just in love with God and the Bible.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t do well is that I just didn’t feel like it is what I was meant to do. I picked engineering because it’s what I felt like I was supposed to do, but I didn't really care about making a lot of money or having a big house or anything like that. I mean, I enjoyed agriculture and soil science and all that. In fact, I think it is just as “spiritual” of a job as I have now.

But it wasn’t the setup I was after.

Yeah, I could have hunkered down and done the work, but I didn't. And I think Call of Duty, memes, and dreams were excuses I used to cover up the fact that I wasn’t happy and wasn’t healthy. In fact, they may have been coping mechanisms to deal with underlying issues I didn’t have the language or the skills to work through at the time and in some ways still don’t.

Just the idea of flying solo was a huge shift for me. I went from living in a household of 12, doing laundry for 12, loading/ unloading the dishwasher for 12, cooking regularly for 12, taking kids to ball practice, and being totally eat up with FFA, basketball, church, and high school life to living in a two bedroom trailer by myself three hours from home.

I moved in to my trailer a little early to get a feel for the campus and start my work study job, which is a story for another day, but I don’t think it was enough of a transition. When the semester started, I was taking like 18 hours of classes, including that chemistry class I was telling you about, and I crashed hard.

History of Technology and Civilization, Chemistry, Calculus I, MatLab, and English.

Thinking about this now… I wonder how it would have gone had I taken a lesser load or a different set of classes.

I wasn’t expecting this when I started. This kind of hit harder than I expected.

There’s actually a lot more unprocessed pain here than I thought. I just realized those things that supposedly distracted me from classes (the partying, the video games, Bible study, and discovering Reddit) are actually the things I’ve held onto all the time to distract from a fact I’m just starting to realize as I’m writing here in Waffle House at 3:30 on the Third Sunday of Advent in 2023.

This would have been tough for anyone, and it’s no surprise I failed chemistry.

All this time I’ve been so hard on myself. All this time I’ve had so much built up shame. But for some reason I started writing this article with a goofy title that I just randomly wrote with no idea where it was going, and I’m almost in tears because, for the first time, I actually feel a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders I’ve been carrying around since 2011.

I think I’m done with this one.

God bless.

And thank you.