Where does your father do his barnacles? Unfucked Edition Part 6

No one in my circle knew that I had dropped out. We bought the tickets for this trip nearly a year before graduation. We planned the whole trip with certainty. Everything worthwhile in biology or any other science takes loads of work over a long period of time. And the more I found subjects that fascinated me the more obstructions I found that would keep me from doing the science that I was certain that I wanted to do. I saw a future where for decades I’d be waiting and, for the price of endless guilt, I’d be hoping for superiors, tenured professors, my possibly treasured mentors to die or lose enough mental facilities to be shooed away from campus or it could even go worse. There could be a timeline where I had to worm-tongue my way into some old professor’s grant money just so they can earn the credit. Or I could go to the private sector where my dreams die and the dream of a tomato fused with fish oil or a blueberry-grape hybrid that’s marketed to the parents of obese children is actualized and profited upon. I’d sit in classrooms looking down the trajectory of all my possible futures until I could eventually only hear the same oppressive thought: This won’t get me any closer to doing the work that I want to do.

So like that I started to miss classes, assignments. I’d stumble through group projects and let everyone else pick up my slack. I stopped studying for tests and instead raced to be the first done. The mark of a C on an essay written the morning it was due about a book I’d never read became an achievement higher than any A I sacrificed a week of effort for. I was stealing my time back and unknowingly altering my life trajectory, something at that time I perceived as a certainty.

I remember after the first class I failed. Knowing that my scholarship would most likely come under review, I went straight to the nearest plasma center.