Seven years ago, I was a senior at Purdue University Calumet, going for a major in Mathematics and a minor in Computer science. I had six classes left till graduation.

Many of my friends were either phd students or juniors/seniors in computer science. The closer that I came towards graduating, the harder it was for me to attend class so every semester from age 23-25, I would take a class and fail. I would describe this feeling of being so close yet not able to push through those last classes as me trying to take a walk down a road of setting cement, until my legs are hardened into it and unable to move.

I lived on my own, paid all my bills and tried to move on from a life-altering marriage that I did not take seriously, followed by a divorce that I took very seriously. I cried myself to sleep for four years after the divorce because it was the closest love that I had ever felt. I had got married to leave a household of abuse.

My dad was really smart and helped me with some of my graduating classes. It mesmerized me that he could just open up a near-graduate level book and understand whatever chapter that I presented without previous knowledge. He had been accepted into a physics PHD program at Purdue University when he was younger but notably, he did not have a degree in Math, he had a master’s in physics.

My dad, Jim’s occasional help with my college-level senior homework started allowing me to admire him and appreciated his genius, instead of hating him for growing up in a household of violence and abuse. The only way to make him a little happy with his choice of marrying my mom and having me as a daughter was to value what he valued and take science as far as he had taken it, maybe even further. Also, I love science.

Something prevented me from graduating, and I don’t know what it was, but the closer I was to finishing, the harder if became to even read the most simple of sentences. Sometimes I could not read at all. A paragraph about biology would be as foreign and unlegible to me as Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I would open up a fully english book only to read a sentence that I could not piece together in any meaningful or comprehensive way. This is the same force that prevented me from finishing my last class at the end of 2016.

It was a blow to my ego to settle for an associates from the College of Lake County, after almost obtaining a Bachelor of Science from Purdue University, but nevertheless, I moved on in 2014 to transfer to the associate degree of science.
Recently, I was not able to complete the last class required for graduation, which left me with no self-worth, or self-value.

I felt that life had cheated me out of everything that I had ever hoped and dreamed.

I felt nothing but despair and suicidal thoughts after attempting the last class. I wondered why/how I used to be smart, but yet was not able to read, much less comprehend a single paragraph from a book at desparate times that i most needed to study! I believed I was degenerating into an animal, and worse, my greatest fear was that I was in fact, extremely stupid.

The trauma of failing again and again becomes so unbearable, I felt like the only way out was suicide.

~
I met you in August 2014. We started being together December 2014.
Over the course of two years there were times where the thought of you, the idea of you would drive me forward. I would go running and think about you. When I would work, I would think about you. The though of you became a light in my very dark world.

Despite fighting my feelings, I had begun to think that you were my soul mate. I had flashes of hope that once I finished this last class, I could move on to a fulfilling stage of my life with you, grounded in some systematic normalcy. I thought hat maybe there was someone for me. After being with you regularly, I learned that being alone all the time was very unhealthy. I noticed how much healthier I had been having you to fall asleep next to.

I wanted to rely on myself but being with you made me realize that it is impossible to live life alone, and to go at everything you do in life alone.
You made me realize that I did not want to be alone anymore, and that people might not be as bad as I thought. But I did not want to be with anyone, I wanted to be with you more and more.

I keep thinking that I would have finished my Math and Computer Science degree at Purdue if I had only had a pinch more of support from someone, somewhere, that gets it. If only my parents were capable of helping me monetarily, I could have focused on those near-graduate-level classes. If only I had faith that somewhere, there was somebody that I could safely fall back to if I failed. If only my parents loved me. If only I could open up my heart enough to fall in love, or even marry someone again.
But it never came, and five years later, the closest place that I found the love and support that I desperately needed was at a strip club, which is where I met you in 2014.

I resented this when I came back into stripping at age 31 after trying to finish the last science class of my choice in October 2016.
What was worse is that I found that coming back to the strip club environment was like the most simple paragraph out of a book that my confused mind turned into gibberish and symbolic Egyptian hieroglyphics.
I could no longer make great money with ease and nothing about it made sense. I was crushed, defeated and hopeless.

I really think that if I had even a little more support, from you, who was my supposed boyfriend at the time, I could have pushed through that last class and broke onto a resurrected life that I abandoned seven years ago in sadness and trauma.

Isn’t this what people in love do for each other? Aren’t they supposed to pick each other up when one of them is down? Or help them through the most difficult of times to become a better person? I realized that I was truly alone, even though you would rather have had me think that I was with you, and I struggled to put my hand down my throat and pull out a light, if any light still existed, within myself.