Thursday, October 21, 2010

Don’t Have That Luxury- Part 4


I Found Out Something Interesting

I found out something interesting.  If you have defaulted on student loans, a college’s Financial Aid Department won’t touch you for seven years, and you have to have made some sort of monthly payments on the loans for at least one year. So, being the clever girl that I was, and still finding it much easier to live on the state than to make my own living, I paid the bank that held my loans one dollar a month during the seventh year, and then signed up for basic math and English classes, still having no clue what I wanted to do.
 Found out something else that was real interesting. As long as I was in school, I didn’t have to repay the old loan, and could get all the new loans I wanted, even if I only took a couple of classes per semester. That little strategy let me stretch out my education for nearly seven years, before I finally decided on the trade that really fitted my personality. 

I know I’ve given you some rather amusing examples of my immaturity, and it would be easy to conclude that I was simply lazy and didn’t want to make the effort to support myself. But there’s a deeper reason.  You see, I was raised in a family of very resourceful and clear thinking females who were older than me, and therefore had more experience in solving problems, so I never really had to, and up until just a few years ago, I was convinced to my soul that I could not solve any real-world problems on my own. So I let the world do it for me. As much as I envied the people who were doing it every day, it terrified me to even think about being on my own, because I knew I would fall flat on my face, so didn’t even try. And “the system” makes it very easy to continue the pattern; as long as I follow the rules and am willing to jump through the hoops, I don’t have to make my own living.

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