Re-Educating a Life of Failure

Essentially, I would like to re-educate myself, but I'm not necessarily sure how to actually go about following through with the idea that I have.

I'm a 29 year old guy who is a high school and college dropout. I have always been clever, though spacey and despondent, so my relationship with school has been a bit toxic. I feel left behind by the education system and would like to teach myself what I've missed out on, so I can begin to learn more advanced subjects.

For instance, I'm absolutely terrible at math. I never so much as tried to learn it.

Since my teens, I have pursued somewhat pipe dreams. Not that anything can't be achieved, I just don't know if it's my path. I certainly know I wouldn't be doing it for the right reasons. I have always dreamed of being a famed writer, and while I love conceptualizing stories, I'm terrible at seeing them through, and only ever legitimately invested myself in that for the aspect of glory.

At the root of dreaming up stories, is the fact that I like to marvel. This takes me back to my earlier days in childhood having been a natural little scientist explorer, tinkerer, wonderer, though I was often told to reel it in or stop taking stuff apart.

As a preteen and teen, society screamed what success meant, and having been an artsy, writerly, daydreamed I was I wanted to seek fame and fortune in show business, which is impossible to break into unless you're willing work your ass off to do that—something an apathetic 14 year old had no concept of.

Despite putting my scientific passions aside to dream loftily about creative success, it never left me and I continued to read scientific articles as a layman. Throughout life I have marveled at the cosmos and the nature of the universe.

In the most enlightening spell of my life, I find myself at rock bottom—which is surprisingly a peaceful position to be in. I am looking homelessness in the face in a few days when my lease ends, but I stopped mourning it a long time ago. After a crippling battle with depression, I have had a series of epiphanies based on two things: Absurdist philosophy and Neil Degrasse Tyson's pragmatic views of existence and death.

When realizing that nothing matters to our objective reality, it's easy to see what matters most to our human experience: ourselves alone. It's not until we nurture ourselves that we can begin to love anything else.

And what matters most to me is learning. I've fought learning for 30 years, but in the woodwork it's been my life force.

I want to restart my education process in a concentrated, condensed manner teaching myself everything I failed to learn in my youth. I want to retake the ACT exam and actually try to succeed in it, so I can go back to college prepared to study astrophysics/theoretical physics.

All of this puts me in the mind of that stupid Adam Sandler movie, but that's essentially what I want to do for myself. A relative suggested reviewing the state education standards as a start, but o if any of you other educators have any advice for how to proceed it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you, Charlie

Submitted June 23, 2017 at 06:12PM by dadsusernameplus http://ift.tt/2tYBv9G