REDEFINING EDUCATION

As I sit in the back of the cop’s cruiser hand cuffed and high, the hazardous material team and state troopers are bringing out all the parts of my meth lab. Shop lifting common chemicals to make meth gave the cops all the reason they needed to search my house. My extensive drug career was over, because I had finally been busted. For me, at this time in my life, the only thing that mattered was being high and finding the means, no matter the cost, to stay high. I didn’t know it at the time, but thanks to this kind of thinking I would be brought to just enough pain, to want to make a change in my life. While I was locked up, I had plenty of time to think about the choices that got me there. I also spent many hours thinking of where I wanted to go from there. I was looking at five to twenty-five (years), it was time to choose my fate. Option one, take a plea deal, go to prison, and continue with the life that I had created for myself. Option two, take a diversion program of rehab for two years, and try being clean, something I had never done before. By taking the second option, I was redefining what I thought education and success meant to me. The only education I ever needed before was to outsmart the cops and that kind of thinking finally caught up to me. Before I got caught, I measured my level of success by how high I could get and how long I could stay that high. However, I no longer wanted to live the drug life style, which was all I ever knew. Fast forward three years, I am working in the field of recovery and I am enrolled in college with the goal of become a licensed drug and alcohol counselor. I have cleaned up a lot of wreckage from my past and have broken free from my old lifestyle.

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Most people would say being educated means having a degree and being successful would be making lots of money with said degree. For me, being educated is using my life experience to guide me in how I want to make a difference in the world. Also, to make my past mistakes have meaning and use them to better myself. Being successful would be leaving behind positive change in the people I get to help.

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In school at a young age I didn’t do very well and was worried about what other kids thought of me. School and my future were the last of my worries, because I spent most time avoiding school work and spent my time out of school trying to be the wildest kid possible.  Gerald Graff, in “Hidden Intellectualism An excerpt from They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing”, states, “Everyone knows some young person who is impressively “street smart” but does poorly in school” (1). Graff is explaining in this section of the article that, we all know someone that we can tell, from the way they navigate situations, they are smart. However, they still do poorly in school (1). This was me, I did poorly in school not because I wasn’t smart, but I used my intelligence to try to fit in rather than to do well in school. Those around me might think that my life has been without meaning and view me as uneducated. They would be wrong, I may not have learned everything one should do in life, but I have learned everything one should not do in life. Such as, I should not have had two boys that I was not willing and able to take care of. I had my first son when I was eighteen and my second while I was in the army two years later (exactly two years later, their birthdays are on the same day). Still my drug use was more important to me then a relationship with my children. I didn’t meet my oldest son till I got clean (he was thirteen) and I ran out on my youngest son when he was three. This is something that haunted me till I made amends and started building a relationship with them. To hear my sons call me dad is a feeling I cannot explain, because I gave up on the dream of being in their lives many years ago. I should not have made my family watch, as I slowly committed suicide with a needle. My sixteen-year-old brother told me while we were walking home “I am glad you got clean, because I thought for sure you were going to die”. This was gut wrenching to hear, because I didn’t realize how many people’s lives were affected, by my actions, till I got clean. Everything I learned was through hard life experiences brought on by my own choosing and my drug addiction. With a new future on the horizon I needed more than my street smarts to get me to my goals. Malcolm X, in “A Homemade Education” stated, “In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there-I had commanded attention when I said something. But now trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional” (1). Malcolm X is telling us in this essay how he went to prison uneducated and came out with “A Homemade Education” (1). Malcom X was a controversial black rights advocate, who got his education by reading the dictionary, books, and corresponding with people, while he was in prison. Even though I am not self-taught, I can relate to what he is saying in this quote. I cannot reach my goal of becoming successful with just streets smarts, but also, I need to have a formal education. That’s why I started college with the hopes of getting my associates degree and becoming a licensed drug and alcohol counselor.  Those are just a few of my past experiences that I have learned from and what I want to strive for in the near future. If a person can see how hopeless I was, then maybe they can see there is hope for them as well. If one person that hears my story can find hope in it, then my past experiences will have meaning.

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I must try and achieve my goal, of using my past life experiences to make a difference. I started by setting a “big, hairy, audacious, goal” something Rodney Robinson, a mentor of mine, said I needed to make. I decided that I want to open a non-profit rehab in West Virginia. I want to bring peace and harmony to a place I have only helped destroy. First, I set small achievable goals, I got a job as a detox technician and became manager of a sober living home. I am in my second semester of college, some where I never thought I would be, and I am doing well with my grades. This is a long-term goal and I am far from even reaching the tip of the iceberg, of things I need to do. However, my plan is to finish my degree, work as a counselor till my son out here goes to college, and then transfer my credentials to West Virginia. After I am in West Virginia I will be working as a drug and alcohol counselor, part time student pursuing further education, and seeking out funding for my non-profit. Wow, just reading that in this essay seems overwhelming, but I think that if I stay clean and take the next indicated step then anything is possible or at least that has been my experience thus far. Helping people is where I find the most happiness and I believe that it is what helps me stay sober in some ways. This is how I will use my past experiences to make me a better person and partly where I will get my success from.

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Going through this world only worried about money and only thinking of yourself, is how most people live their lives. Is how much money you make and how others perceive your life what makes you successful? I would argue, it doesn’t. David Foster Wallace, in, “Transcription of 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address- May 21, 2005”, states, “It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of some how altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self” (3). In this speech Wallace is telling the graduating students that being educated is the freedom to choose what you think about and how you perceive your daily lives (3). For me choosing a career that is centered in getting out of self and helping others, is more important than money and fame. If I can afford to run the rehab and provide for myself, then in my eyes, I will be successful. Being able to perceive my own success is proof of being educated. If I can help one person, then that person may change his or her family for the better. By the family being changed, brings light and hope to the neighborhood. That’s worth more than any amount of money, because the ripple effect of someone getting clean has the potential of changing so many peoples lives for the better.

             A Master’s and a PHD is not what makes you educated. In addition, fame, money, and having a trophy wife does not make you successful. In the end, you’re only affecting yourself and not bettering the world around you because the world will be the same when you leave it. To be educated is to take what you have learned and make a difference in the world. Being successful is leaving a lasting change in people and the world that you have encountered. That way when you are no longer here you are still having a positive impact on the world and have made things better not just for yourself but for future people. I spent the majority of my life only living to please my self and when the cards fell, there was no one at the table but me. That is a kind of self-inflected loneliness, I wish to never feel again. By helping others and living a healthier more positive life I have faith that I will not have to.

Work Cited

Undefined, Undefined undefined. “‘They Say/I Say’: the Moves That Matter in Persuasive Writing.” "They Say/I Say": the Moves That Matter in Persuasive Writing, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, W.W. Norton, 2007, pp. 1–1.

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Wallace, David f. “2005 Kenyon Commencement Address.” 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address. 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, 21 May 2005, Kenyon , Kenyon .

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“Homemade Education.” Homemade Education, by Malcolm X. and Malcolm X., 2003, pp. 1–1.