My Biggest Mistake

I did have some good professors there. The classes were entertaining and that college didn't cost too much for my family's budget. It was also just a continuation of high school with pretty much the same sheltered lifestyle living at home and two more years of social pressure eroding my life plans and pushing them toward things I'm not physically or emotionally suited to.

I look back at it and I'm shocked... because I didn't learn very much in any classes I took anywhere. Some were entertaining and others weren't, but I can and do find entertaining deep topical discussions all the time with experts without paying them a lot of money for the privilege. I do not learn best in structured environments.

I do well in them but it bears no relation to life. Life has no grades. Life has no structure. You get out of that school environment and no one's going to tell you when you'll need to look something up or do something. Nothing in that background prepared me for living on my own or doing the career I chose.

Instead, two more years of social pressure deepened some problems I already had with writer's block when if I'd broken free earlier at the emotionally intense passage of becoming legal age, I'd have had far less holding me back from the only thing that does teach professional fiction writing. Editors whom you've sent stories to.

Do that enough times and the editors take an interest. They begin to critique and communicate the needs of their specific publications. That's the only training that really exists for fiction writing because English classes do not touch on it -- they teach academic writing which is a completely different specialty. If you don't have a writer in the family, learning to become one takes being an autodidact -- someone who learns best on their own by reading and exploring.

What followed that mistake was a cascading series of mistakes that cost me years, decades of my life as I went down the blind alleys that other people's ideas of what I should do with my life led to. I'm physically disabled. My family was in denial of that.

Writing fiction isn't physically strenuous and even with the technology of the times was well within reach of my abilities. Making it through four year school when I had to walk across the campus from dorm to class was not. I flunked out in flames. The part time jobs I took to survive also all went down in flames demanding physical tasks I'm not capable of -- all with the humiliation factor brought on by the denial I got raised to.

I was drawn to California for any number of reasons. One reason I didn't think about would have made an enormous difference -- and that is the way California even then had a much better health care system with more outreach. I would probably still have tried to wait tables and file papers and fall apart working jobs I'm not capable of, but my chances of finding help when reality crashed in on me would've been better there than anywhere else I've lived.

I did eventually live in San Francisco for two wonderful years and then made the second big mistake of my life leaving it, that was for reasons of my biggest romantic mistake. So I have a few regrets down the line -- but if I'd moved out there sooner I might have had a better shot at figuring out what was really going on with why I couldn't walk down a hall in the expected time according to anyone else's schedules and come to accept that I can't count on functioning any given day soon enough to do something about it.

That plagued me for decades and I didn't get it sorted out till I was in my forties, till I'd been homeless and destitute, till I'd literally starved for several months and been through uncountable bad living situations when too sick to work -- it would always happen.

So there was my biggest mistake.

Sometimes it's not that you're lazy or unambitious, sometimes it's not lack of character. Sometimes life is just harder for some people than others and the reason turns out not to have any malice behind it, just random bad luck. It was in my bones and not my mind after all.

I was attracted to California for social and political reasons and for its great natural beauty. But I was more functional there because of its mild climate and easy year-round undramatic temperatures. Seasons and I do not get along, that was the one time in my life when I could count on doing about the same in June or February or October or May, any time of year it was about what it was. I miss that. As I put up with a bad month and spend way too many days stuck being sick instead of doing anything I want to, I miss that so much sometimes.

I should've gone there first and barring that, stayed when I had managed to fumble my way there at all.