The Year I Left
"I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive myself", I said to my therapist when she told me dropping out of college was in my best interest. A week later, I did drop out, here's how I've felt since.
It was early January 2026. I had only started seeing this campus health therapist the month prior. She was asking me how my winter break was and if I was excited for the coming semester. “I haven’t gotten around to registering for classes yet,” I told her. My enrollment period had come and gone in November; I needed to talk to my advisor, but I kept putting it off. She told me it said a lot about my relationship with college. I knew it did, but I did have every intention to enroll before the first day of class. She asked me what was stopping me from taking a break, “I don’t think I’ll come back, I’m already behind, and I just want to get it over with.” She countered with “Would you rather leave now or be forced out if you continue to fail?” That struck me, because flunking out was a far more embarrassing option than claiming to ‘leave on my own volition.’
By the 7th of January, I had made my decision. It wasn’t something I pondered on; one second, I was a college student, and the next, I was a college dropout. I kept it to myself for a few days, only confiding in my mom. She supported my decision, which surprised me, because she was very pro-education. She grew up in a house where you got a degree, no questions, that’s just what you did. So, to have her support signaled to me that I had reached a point of no return; people were worried about me. Everyone was finally realizing how unhappy I was. However, I did not feel free or really any happier. The weeks that followed were some of the worst to date.
I spent days in bed; when I did leave, it was only out of necessity, and I made sure to go quietly so my friends couldn’t ambush me. One day, I went to pick up a prescription, my antidepressants, but instead, all I did was cry in the Costco parking lot and go home. Then I cried in my parking garage. Cried while I made my dinner, just to cry while I ate it too. I was so upset with myself, I remember thinking: “Why couldn’t I do it?” At some point, I began to think of my brain as an entity separate from myself. I thought that part of me was physically diseased, and it needed to be cut out. I started to fantasize about banging my head against a wall, or the sharp corner of my desk, or sticking it in the oven, or even a lobotomy. My mind had failed me so abhorrently, and I wanted to hurt it just as badly. In hopes of irreversibly altering my consciousness, to become something different than the one that had failed. But I didn’t hurt myself. Eventually, I went to pick up my medicine, and then figured I’d be fine.
I decided not to stick around for long. Telling people over and over about my biggest failure was a personal hell. I thought about writing a newsletter and letting everyone find out that way. But the news came as a shock to people. They didn’t know I wasn’t okay, let alone bad enough for this. I was not keen to pay inflated college town rent for any longer than I had to, so I decided to move as far away as I could. But until then, I could party.
I spent my last two months there saying yes to as much as I could. It was the last time we would all be together like this, then I’d leave, and our lives would carry on differently. I remember one night I went to a birthday party, at the pre-game, my friends kept handing me shots and toasting to “going away”. I drank too much before we even got to the party. I was floating around saying my hello’s before it really hit me. Someone gave me their sunglasses, and I felt better, then I got a beer, Irish Goodbye’d, and walked to my friend’s apartment across the street. He was playing Beerio Kart with his roommates, and I joined even though I’m historically bad at it. I texted my friends to come pick me up, “sweet treats are on me.” When they showed up, there were seven people already in the car, and we stopped at Insomnia on the way back. We went up to their apartment (right above mine), I texted my roommate that I needed an escort, and proceeded to puke in the bathroom. She came and got me. Most of my weekends looked like that until I left.
It’s been five months since I dropped out, three since I moved, and it feels okay. I work full-time as an Innkeeper at a small hotel. It’s completely unimpressive and perfect. After spending so much time suffering, it’s good to do something simple. What everyone wants to know is if I’ve forgiven myself. I know myself well and was right to assume that I wouldn’t. However, like with all guilt, pain, and grief, it does not get better; you only learn to get on with life.
What people ask me most these days is “Do you regret it?” It’s a complicated answer. I know that going to college was the wrong choice for me, but it taught me a lot about how to be a person. The feeling reminds me of a line from LCD Soundsystem: “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision—for another five years of life.” There are things that I had to do at college: I had to get drunk and embarrass myself, I had to fight with my roommates, I had to learn how to cook, and I had to cry with my friends. Those things taught me how to exist, maybe through a different lens. I was never meant to get a degree, but instead a crash course on how to be kind.
It’s okay that all of this happened. It’s terrible to have spent so much time in pain, but it’s okay. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying not to feel the way I did in college. I will always wonder what it would’ve been like if things had been different. But I think every version of myself would’ve fucked it up.