No one said it was easy. No one said there wouldn’t be some rough spots.

No one said that one day, you would have to make a choice, make a decision in a month’s time that will set your course in life.

Looks like I’m in that situation. A very important decision rests on my shoulders….either stay or go.

Stay…go. Stay…go.  Stay…go. Like a broken record, repeating itself, screaming for my attention, begging me to fix it. Sure, I can just walk away from the situation, leave home for a few hours, and dumb out…but you know what? It’s still there. It’s not going away, it demands action.

My parents (or to be more exact, my dad) is throwing everything at me to get me to go back. Some of my friends are “dude, come back, we need you at the station” or “just do it”.

So many voices to hear. And so many to mute just to make this my own decision, just like I did in November. This is again, the hardest decision I have to make right now.

It’s no secret that when I left FSC last year, I was coming out a fucked-up mess. Torn asunder from everything, feeling like the biggest scumbag ever for doing what I thought was the “right thing” for myself. It was awful. And yet, it was necessary.

I’ve been through a lot, but nothing like that before. I honestly felt as if I wrote a conclusion to a part of my life, and that if I was going back to school, I would want to start anew.

In other words…I left FSC, with intent to never return. And now here I am, “politely demanded” to go back.

While I was away from college, trying to fix the many broken pieces of my life, I started making music more and more. Just to keep myself busy, to keep myself from going insane, to give my now-directionless life meaning. A way to talk to someone without saying a word about my life when no one was around.
It became fun again, and soon I realized how much I wanted to do this for a living. And if I was to do this, I should really go to school for it.

Alas, like I said last time…every school I looked at, there was a problem. Berklee demands a live audition with an instrument. AI is too expensive, so is BU, so is Full Sail University (a “vocational college” as my dad said).

So…yeah, that’s where I am right now. Dead set against going back to FSC, yet can’t go to a college that I think would be best for me to due to their financial/entrance demands.

I was told point-blank that I had done nothing since I left. Nothing. So I guess song-writing, beat-making, and various other music activities done on my laptop don’t count. Guess it’s not real at all, it’s nothing.

You wouldn’t understand how much that hurts. You wouldn’t understand how tempted I was to tell my parents “hey look…I am doing something with my life, and while it’s not what you expected from me, you’ll just have to accept it!” You wouldn’t get it, unless you were there.

As I type this out, I think about all these things. All these perceptions, about how I’m not worth jack shit to 99% of the population if I don’t go back to school, about how my family is quietly ashamed about having a “college dropout” in the family.

About how I’m bound to failure unless I go back, about what my parents want from me as a son.

About how I left for a lot of reasons, about how I’m coming to realize I’m not a college person at all, about how things didn’t work out as I hoped.

About how I feel as if I can make this work, yet I have no faith from the people that should have faith in me, about how I went to hell, fought tooth-and-nail to leave, and now you want me to go back and do it again.

It’s troubling. A simple checkbox shouldn’t have an entire life hanging in the balance.