This is where I start shitting the bed. Not literally; ever since the bedbugs I slept on a $150 futon I bought on Amazon (it sucked), or a $50 air mattress from Walmart (it was awesome). I also didn’t shit either of those, so that’s a positive note.
I was still in college, the spring 2015 semester. At the time I was majoring in Informatics, my minor being Pre-Law. I’ve always had a fascination with the legal system, likely from my father being a paralegal when I was young and my mother working for the regional branch of the Federal Public Defender’s office. Add in being encouraged to stay informed as a child and discovering John Grisham books as a teenager and the only thing that stopped me from majoring in Pre-Law was a realization that I just didn’t have the drive to make it as a lawyer. You need, among other traits, a hunger not fueled by need for that line of work.
But a minor made sense to me. It gave me a background in the most basic concepts of the legal field that I could use to make myself more appealing for government-based IT jobs, or something like that. My first course in this minor was Con(stitutional) Law, taught by a lovely woman whose name I forget. She gave engaging lectures, had us write weekly briefs and our semester project was to write a report on our experiences sitting in on a real-life court proceeding.
It was a week after that particular assignment was (for me, past) due that I found myself in the courtyard of Mouton Hall, where her class met. I had this tightness in my chest, this tension that made me stop there and sit down. As I looked up at the window connected to her classroom, a feeling of impending doom swelled within me. I couldn’t hear my surroundings, not really. All I knew was that I needed to be NOT THERE. So, mustering what sense and courage I could amid this assault of sudden terror, I got up and left the way I came. I walked back to my apartment, went inside, and laid on my stomach without even turning a light on. At some point Pen Pen, my cat hopped on my back and settled in. It helped, but I was still gripped by phantom fear until I eventually passed out.
After that first panic attack, I didn’t go to campus for the rest of the semester except for my student job. Two courses I managed to pass with a C thanks to having straight A’s in them until that point; the other two (including Con Law) I flunked. I told myself that it was a bad semester, and that I’d take the summer, save some money at my job and hit the ground running in the fall.
So that was a fucking lie. Fall was even worse. I took an electrical engineering course which I promptly no-showed after several weeks. The two highlights of that course were me learning about logic gates, and leaving my student email logged into the computer only to check it the following day and find that ‘I’ had written an email to myself with the subject line ‘I love dicks.’ Thanks, anonymous fellow student for merely dunking on me and not using the power you had to inflict serious damage.
I didn’t fail all my courses at least; I took a nighttime polisci course where we’d watch and dissect a documentary each week. Really, it was more of a media literacy course–but it was fantastic. I only wish I had done better work than C-grade, since I also admired the professor immensely. I don’t believe Dr. Teten is still at the university, but I’m still grateful for the passion and drive to inspire us you showed in your courses.
