Back To School

I tested out of high school at the end of my junior year, when I was seventeen years old. I immediately enrolled in junior college, but when classes started I looked around and found myself surrounded by the people I had just succeeded in escaping from- it was just like high school, but with a smoker's lounge. I had already been working for three years, so I quit junior college, thinking that I would go back to it later, and began to work full-time. I didn't know then that "later" would be decades.

People warned me. They told me to stick it out in school and get my education while I was young because the working world has a way of swallowing you whole and never spitting you out. I didn't listen. I sacrificed myself at the altar of manual labor and for 32 years I've been a food service professional. I'm a hard worker. I don't really know what to do with myself if I'm not working hard. And, school never really felt like particularly hard work. Restaurants? Now, that's some hard work! School? That's my playground.

When I was thirty-seven, I went back to school at a two-year college just north of my home. I entered with an interest in Early Childhood Education, but quickly switched my major to Liberal Arts English, which allowed me to exercise the full scope of my nerd-superhero skills. Yes, I'm one of those people who actually enjoys reading the classics and writing critical essays about what I've read. I know, get a life. There is really nothing more exciting to me than receiving a particularly challenging assignment; I feel a great sense of purpose fill me up. I know, really, get a freakin' life!

When I was four credits shy of completing my B.A. and transferring to a four-year college, my marriage came to an abrupt end. Needing to prioritize my use of limited resources, I deferred acceptance to school and moved west to get my head and heart together. Two years later, I returned to Western Massachusetts and went right back to work in the family business, baking and selling vegan pastries. More than three years have passed since my return and I have loved every moment I have given to the cafe- it reflects my love and care in myriad ways both great and small. I am deeply gratified by its success. And, I am ready for my second career, one that doesn't require I stand at a table for eight to ten hours a day, poking my index finger into cupcakes.

This fall, I will return to school to become a paralegal, a fancy term for a legal assistant. I'm really excited about this and so happy and proud that I had the wisdom, five months ago, to create a space for myself in such an excellent school. When I tell people that I'm going to be a paralegal, their faces go a little blank and I can tell that they are working hard with the idea. I find it curious and funny, because it seems like such a natural thing for me to do, but other people see me more as a creative, artistic, entrepreneurial person than the word paralegal conjures. What some people don't realize is that I am happiest when I am behind the scenes, attending to details, while the front man gets all the attention. Besides, I need to sit down for a while!