Second Time Around

Personal Essay and Courtesy Photo by CALEB GALBREATH

I used to dress up every Friday for school. It was something I started doing at tech school on the days we weren’t working with our hands. I continued this tradition at Western, at least, until I started getting called “professor” by strangers in passing.

I’m 26 years old. It’s old enough that freshman look at me like I’m an artifact and young enough that anyone over 30 scoffs when I use the word “old.”

There’s nothing wrong with being the “older student” on campus. The time it took me to get to Western offered me a perspective most of my peers don’t share. It’s what has allowed me to succeed here and, in just a few weeks, graduate with a bachelor’s degree in visual journalism.

I frequently get asked what I did before I came to Western, a question I almost never hear asked of my younger peers. I assume this is because most students share the same story; they’ll have come to college directly after high school. I was on that same path. I started at the University of Washington the fall after high school graduation, but that’s usually where the similarities in my story end with younger college students.

UW was a huge school and I was small. I drowned in anxiety and depression, unable to help myself and too frightened to seek out the help I needed. I skipped class most days and took to binge drinking when I felt particularly helpless.

The simplest tasks became impossible chores. Cleaning my room, meeting a friend, working out — they all seemed too daunting. I was lost. After two quarters, I dropped out.

I wasn’t even 19 years old and was already moving back in with Mom and Dad. It wasn’t ideal to say the least, and they made little effort to hide their disapproval. I bounced from one dead-end job to the next. I worked at Taco Bell for a few months, volunteered at the local hospital, moved cars for a Honda dealership — at one point I was working as a “specimen processing technician,” which is a fancy way of saying I poured people’s urine samples into a vile for drug testing. I still joke that it was the pissiest job I ever had.

I tried joining the Navy to become a corpsman but was ultimately rejected due to budget cuts. After that, I felt like I had exhausted every option. I started running with a bad crowd — the kind of people who felt like they had no options left either.

After several interventions, my parents gave me an ultimatum: Make a change or find somewhere else to live. This was my wakeup call — even my impossibly supportive parents were ready to feed me to the wolves.

Going back to university still wasn’t appealing to me. I had always loved music and photography, so attending technical school for a production degree caught my interest. The only problem was that I had no money and my parents had no desire to fund another fruitless attempt at higher education.
 I had to come up with the money myself. I didn’t want to toil away and save for ages so I needed a job that would pay well. This is how I came to work for a commercial fishing company in Valdez, Alaska. I wish I could say it was just like “The Deadliest Catch,” but the Alaskan waters are fairly tame in the summer and I spent most of my time on shore.

I could write a book on the four months I spent working there. I worked on average 19 hours per day, seven days a week. During that summer I was shot at, chased by a knife-wielding meth addict, robbed, beaten and marooned on Kodiak for two days. I pushed myself mentally, physically and spiritually further than I ever had before.

I made enough money to go back to school, as well as gained a few stories to tell. Classes started just three days after I got back from Valdez.

I was 20 years old when I started at Bates Technical College, and it was no walk in the park. I was one of the youngest people in the program. I had class all morning and worked well into the evening. Although I was living with my parents, they almost never saw me. I left the house for school before they were even out of bed and got home from work after they’d gone to sleep.

Thanks to my time in Alaska, I was already accustomed to being perpetually exhausted. I loved what I was learning and was excited to go to class every day. As my skills in audio engineering and cinematography grew, so too did my confidence.

As I drew close to completing my degree, I realized I wanted to do more than just set up recording studios and wrap cables on movie sets. The idea of applying to Western came from a family friend who worked for National Public Radio.

I ruminated on the thought of going back to university for weeks. Just the thought of going back both terrified and excited me.

I had changed a lot in the four years since my first quarter at UW. I’d become more confident, skilled and tenacious. I had chosen a path and followed through on it. It was only because of all these things I went through that I was able to return to university. It took countless, unending days in Valdez, innumerable burns from soldering irons at tech school, losing my parents’ trust and winning it back, to make me who I am now.

I learned how to ask for help. I went to therapists, I started exercising again, eating better and I worked with my doctors to find anti-anxiety medication that worked well for me.

Where I struggled to go to class years ago, I now lead classes in discussion. Where I was unsure of myself, I now face new challenges with confidence.

I’ve been called arrogant by some, perhaps I am, but they’ll never know how hard I worked to cultivate that confidence. Others have called me confrontational, but they’ve never worked where someone’s life depended on you doing your job correctly.

My path gave me a different perspective than many of my peers, that means sometimes we’re going to disagree. That’s OK, that’s part of attending a university. I may be rough around the edges and occasionally mistaken for faculty, but I’m sure of the path I’m on.