pjthompson | Instagram stories

The best: she was so excited to be at the Big U, to be learning new things and adding to her base of knowledge, to be exploring and trying on new ideas. Knowledge excited her and pursuing her literary and artistic ambitions set her mind on fire. The worst: she worked nearly full-time to put herself through school. Her instinct was to avoid student loans and her parents couldn't afford to help, other than to offer room and board. She had almost no spare time for anything but study. She thought herself deprived because she missed out on the whole "party" aspect of college. After graduating with a degree in English Lit. there were not many employment opportunities so she grabbed what she could get: a job was a clerk. She did catch up on her partying then. But after a while she thought it was time to stop messing about, to stop pursuing the dead-end and money-scarce goal of making art. She wanted to make money, to be somebody, maybe go back to school for her MBA. A small bout of cancer scotched those plans. She came out the other side of that experience realizing that she really had been someone all along. She was an artist. That was what made her happy. Life, she concluded, was way the hell too short to be pursuing goals that didn't make her happy. She never regretted that decision.