Dropping Out of College, or At Least Thinking About It

"i feel so lonely all the time, and i cry a lot. im not happy, and im scared because i dont know if i ever will feel happy again."

Thu Oct 1 17:23:15 1998
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 98 00:23:11 GMT
To: cybrgbl@deltanet.com
From: DeltaNet Form Processor (formpro@www.deltanet.com)
Subject: Feedback and or Questions
The field values for the form received were:
Name="yadhira melendez"
email="gigi9869@lycosmail.com"
comments="please help me. for the past couple of weeks, i have felt so depressed. i moved to college, and i have a few friends and i go home about every other weekend. lately, all i do after my classes end is go to my dorm, and cry. i cry so much, and i feel like of attending college is not worth it anymore. i miss my friends, i miss my mom, and i especially miss my x-boyfriend who is 5 hours away from me. i cant eat, i cant sleep, and i cant even concentrate on my studies. i keep getting sick, and i dont feel like doing all the things that used to make me happy. i dont think about suicide, but i want to drop out of college. i feel so lonely all the time, and i cry a lot. im not happy, and im scared because i dont know if i ever will feel happy again.
please tell me im not crazy. i dont know what to do..."
Findout="Just surfed on in!"
recipient="cybrgbl@deltanet.com"
thankURL="http://www.rjgeib.com/about-me/guest/thank-you.html"

      Dear Yadhira,
      You are not crazy; you will be happy again. You are experiencing the shock of change and sense of dislocation it brings, and that is as natural as it is painful. I would address your comments in part by talking about my own past, and so I ask you to have a bit of patience and lend me your ear a for a few minutes. Indulge me, please.
      I remember feeling much like yourself at exactly the same point in life. I worked construction the summer between high school graduation and the beginning of my freshman year in college; and I learned many things in that job, but nothing more important than the fact that I did not want to work construction for the rest of my life. I literally counted down the days until school began in the fall. However, I distinctly remember longing to go back to construction after a couple of weeks of feeling like I didn't belong on this strange, new college campus. University life was novel and unsettling; construction, a job I loathed, was the familiar and the routine to which I had grown accustomed. I laugh when I think about it now - wanting to return to a job I loathed! But I distinctly remember riding the bus home in the fall of 1985 teary eyed and reminiscing about slaving around construction sites and working for a living instead of bumming around campus in the nebulous and unstructured life of a college student! But change is always difficult, especially when you are young and separation from loved ones is involved. Give it time, and I suspect you will grow to like your new home, make new friends, and find emotional and intellectual growth in this new stage in your life. Your going to college and living in a dorm does not mean you forgo your family or your friends. They are still there for you in the home town which bred and nourished you thus far. But you are like a young bird which needs new territories to explore and understand; that you find it time to stretch your wings and fly fast and high does not mean you cannot return to the nest frequently. Nor does it means you should come back and live again in that nest like a baby bird.
      Yadhira, you are presently in college. You are being afforded an opportunity to study and learn which is relatively rare in society, and this will directly effect you the rest of your life. You are no longer a kid, and your job description in the adult world is as follows: university student. It has taken years of success in school and batteries of tests to arrive at where you are today. You are surrounded by bright and intelligent young people in college, many who are enthusiastically soaking up the new ideas and concepts their professors are weaving around them. I doubt not your parents (burdened with the responsibilities and worries that are natural to parents) are excited and a bit envious of you. Do you have any friends who are unable to go to college? Are they not, however, happy for your good fortune - the opportunities afforded you by a university education? What would they think of you dropping out? "Stay in school, Yadhira!" they might say. "We will see each other and smile at Thanksgiving and during vacations. And I am only one phone call away, after all!" Physical distance does not separate those who truly love each other; we are only temporarily away from our loved ones, and we always find our way back to them - one way or another, sooner or later.
      Most of my oldest and best friends are married or have serious girlfriends, pursue busy careers, and have moved to the ends of the country for them. In middle and high school we saw each other every day, spent all our vacations together in college, and shared much of our free time in young adulthood. But today they are so busy with work and family that they have neither the time nor energy to be with me as in the past. Consequently, we only see each other three or four times a year; but each time is so much more special and memorable for it being the more rare. I loved my first girlfriend so much I would have died for her; she marries another man in two weeks, and it is OK. We slug onwards. Such is life, and such is the change the seasons of life brings to friendship. When I speak of friendship in adult life, I of course include my family therein. They are less my "family" every year, and more my friends. I continue to learn from my father and honor my mother's memory, but I am my own master now.
      We must embrace the new, even as we mourn the old. We can only make sense of life looking backwards, but we must live today and concentrate on where we want to be tomorrow. I suggest you get some help from your college's services for student psychological health in the form of a counselor or support group for freshman who are having trouble adapting to campus life: it often helps just to speak your heart, be heard by others, and know you are not the only one treading water. I am sure there many professors and university administrators who would go the extra mile for you, if they knew the trouble you were having. I teach students new to an academically challenging middle school, and I see them groaning under the weight of new teachers, a new schedule, loads more homework and higher expectations than they ever had previously. I try my best to smooth the transition and to help them to succeed, and I do a lot of hand-holding and listening to worried parents tell me how their stressed-out children come home at night and cry. But I want my students to sweat and thereby raise the level of their performance, and most of them after two or three months acclimatize to their new school and life continues not terribly different than it was before. I have seen this happen with more than one or two different groups of young people.
      As it is obvious you grew up surrounded by love and affection, I strongly suspect there are plenty of opportunities for friendship and connection in your new life. I am sure there are numerous students in your immediate circles who would be more than happy to extend a helping hand, if they knew you were struggling. How many other students are also lonely and bewildered in your dorm? How many feel exactly as you do, but hide it by crying alone in their dorm room? How many think they are the only one, alienated from the rest of campus life? But think about the friends you could make! Think about the best moments - the intimacy, the kindness, the warmth of heart, the uniqueness - that you shared with your ex-boyfriend. Think about how awesome it would be to share that with another young man and to walk the quad and classrooms of your new school happy and successful. Give it some time and patience, and I suspect it will happen.
      I look back now at college and recognize it as the time when I was both most acutely miserable and blissfully happy in my life. I miss it today, and wish I had availed myself more of the opportunities it offered me. But we do the best we can, and we tend to forget how difficult it once was as we filter our pasts through the selective memory of nostalgia. You long for your ex-boyfriend, but do you remember why you broke up? With all due respect and the most tender sympathies, I urge you to dry your eyes, suck it up, get out of your dorm room, get into the gym, do your best in class, and make an honest go of it this semester - it still is early in the academic year. Talk with your professors, reach out to those around you, and fight the good fight. Sometimes life just kinda sucks and you have to hang in there, knowing the unhappy spell will not last forever. Tighten your belt, concentrate your energies, and stick it out. I suspect this advice, spoken to you by a stranger who knows you not, is not terribly different from what those who love you best - your friends and family - would tell you.
      You should receive this message Friday morning. Take some time to think about what I said over the weekend and come back Monday with a clearer mind and more positive outlook.
      I hope this letter finds you feeling better. And write me another e-mail if you find yourself in need of another kind word in the future.
      Very Truly Yours,
      Richard Geib

Date: Sat, 03 Oct 1998 18:41:36 +1200
From: Sally Pierson (saallypierson32@hotmail.com)
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01C-XTRA (Win95; I)
To: Richard Geib (cybrgbl@deltanet.com)
Subject: Lost
Richard
I am not sure how I got on to your home page but I did! I was looking up teenage suicide and depression and somehow ended up on your homepage. You seem to be a very self-confident person, Why? I am 17 years old, about to turn 18 and I am so lost in life that it is scarying me. I keep looking, hoping to find a web page where someone shares my thoughts, I am desperate to find someone esle who hurts as much as I do and I want to know why? I am not sure why I am even writing thsi to you but I need answers and I thought maybe since you seemed so clued up you would have some idea of where I can find people who feel like me. I feel like I am stuck in a world without people, alone in my isolation and fear, trapped inside a "bell-jar". Sylvia Plath's Novel The Bell Jar was the closest I have ever come to finding someone who shares the same sense of entrapment I do. Is there ant other works which express such feelings?
I am sorry to bother you but I was interested and intruiged by your page and in vain was wondering if you had any ideas to solve my problem
Yours sincerely
Sally Pierson
sallypierson32@hotmail.com

      Dear Sally,
      You ask me why you are so desperate to find someone via the Internet who hurts as badly as do you. That seems obvious: you would feel less isolated and alienated, less alone and afraid in the world. Rest assured there exist many who feel as you do; isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our post-nuclear, fragmented age of dislocation and organized, efficient loneliness. Global connectivity via the Internet seems to only increase this trend as people stare at tiny blips of electronic light rather than communicate with flesh and blood human beings face-to-face. If you are lost and bewildered, you will not find any easy answers in endlessly scouring the World Wide Web for magical elixirs; the answers you look for are not to be found in the vastness of cyberspace but in the richness of real life; and I urge you to look less into your computer monitor and more into your own heart and soul for them, and to get help from friends and family or a professional therapist trained to help those who are in your predicament. Make not a tart meal out of your unhappiness.
      You ask me for answers? You say I come across as "self-confident?" I have learned, mostly through experience and suffering, some lessons which work for me; and I have never been more content or at peace in my life than I am now. I try to avoid becoming obsessed with the particular drama of my own story and strive not to make an indulgence of my personal insecurities and life disappointments. But still I labor under the painful burden of my frail humanity, and I have my better days and my worse. Sometimes I am hopeful and others despairing, but I fight on and there is consolation in that. But always, both in youth and in maturity, there is the toil and incessant strain of change and (hopefully) personal growth. Solitude and misery are ever our lifelong companions in growing or diminishing degrees, as are companionship and happiness
      Even surrounded by family and community, there is an essential aloneness which all of us knows. We live alone in our skins and realize nobody really knows us very deeply, in the end; and this is true even for happily married people with children, friends, and jobs they like. Even the "popular" kids in high school carry the cross of their solitude to mock public perception. (Perhaps only God sees us completely unadorned and naked at the core!) As Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness writes, "We live, as we dream -- alone." I am no different. (I never feel more lonely than in a crowded bar or at a party full of strangers, and this explains why I rarely go to them; but I hardly ever feel lonely when I am alone.) But it can be enough if we know our friends and family love us, anyway. We can always be good company for ourselves; if you cannot be happy with yourself, you will find it hard to be happy in the company of others. "Be a friend to thyself, so that others may befriend you," my *.sig file concludes every e-mail message I send - as much a reminder to myself as to anyone else. (How many people would never be mindlessly cruel to others, yet are the harshest of taskmasters to themselves?) There is an emotional intelligence to people which one either develops or doesn't; and most "successful" people learn to cultivate this form of intelligence and get on in the world. That doesn't mean you don't occasionally lay in bed in the middle of the night staring into the darkness while contemplating death, thinking about God, mourning past regrets, or pondering our aloneness in the world, but that you get up the next morning and keep fighting. To live life to the end is not a childish act.
      I am a teacher, and my job is to help those of my students who are willing to let me help them help themselves. I do this, in large part, so as to give a measure of meaning to my life and thereby strive to make myself happy. (As Thomas Jefferson tells us, "To contribute by neighborly intercourse and attention to make others happy is the shortest and surest way of being happy ourselves.") I always ask my students on the first day of classes why they go to school. They invariably tell me because they want to learn skills which will one day enable them to get a good job and make mounds of money. Others say they go to school only because their parents make them. Sometimes they ask me why I am a teacher. I tell them I am a teacher because I am a student of life who tries to learn something new everyday so as not to go to bed at night as stupid as I was when I woke up that morning. I look at the ultimate goal of education as the pursuit of the perfection of our lives and the search for happiness and fulfillment through constant study and contemplation. (In today's modern society, that sounds a bit quaint! No?) So my life is a work in progress, and nobody knows how the story will end. But it will end, and I choose to live in such a way as to look back and know I have not lived in vain. I don't know how much time I have left, but I choose to use my time.
      My life has direction and purpose, and this makes a difference. I am unsure and confused about a host of issues in life, but I am sorting things out at my own speed. (God help a man who does not know what he believes in!) Being a young person is always hard because you have to figure out for yourself how you shall live; but your is what you make of it, so make it the best you can. I wish you luck in your life and the story you make for yourself.
      Very Truly Yours,
      Richard Geib
P.S. I say it one more time: get help! Instead of living in your shell, reach out for that which you need!

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a might one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy...
"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
George Bernard Shaw

Date: Sat, 22 Aug 98 22:44:45 GMT
To: cybrgbl@deltanet.com
From: DeltaNet Form Processor (formpro@www.deltanet.com)
Subject: Guest Book Signature
The field values for the form received were:
Name="heinrich"
Age="53"
email="heinrich@hotmail.com"
City?="Detroit"
State?="MI"
Country?="USA"
Findout="Fate"
How is life treating you?="bad at this time but life is still good"
comments="I think fate has brought to your webpage i was on the edge of committing sueside but found your page my wife has left me on friday june 6 i went to work that night and nothing was wrong so it seemed in the morning i came home with a bush flowers and a birthday card and walked in the house that was empty here i was no note or anything she just took the 2 kids and left untill sunday june 7 when she called me at 11;30 pm to tell me she left with an answer that nobody was happy in the house after 14 years of marriage i have seen my kids 3 times in 3 months i know this is a bad story but true untill a better time heinrich"
recipient="cybrgbl@deltanet.com"
thankURL="http://www.rjgeib.com/about-me/guest/thank-you.html"
HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/3.0C-nnie30 (Win95; U)

      Dear Heinrich,
      Your e-mail has truly alarmed me! Let the fever of this evening pass and then look at the way the land lies tomorrow morning. Don't do anything rash, please! Patience and endurance! The night always looks the darkest just before the dawn.
      Please e-mail me in a week telling me you are all right. If fate brought you to my webpage, then use it to keep your head above water until the currents be more temperate. One more time: patience, hope!
      Very Truly Yours From Across the Internet,
      Richard Geib
      Dear Heinrich,
      I trust life is treating you better this week than last.
      Be well, and be gentle with yourself - even if life is not so.
      Very Truly Yours,
      Richard Geib
From: "Heinrich" (heinrich@hotmail.com)
To: cybrgbl@deltanet.com
Subject: question
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 17:08:46 PDT
Status: RO
Do you believe in esp or that someone can hear you acrosse miles? for instants when I thought about some one can there be that you hear her voice.
I tell you the story, yaers ago that is 15 years ago I was here in the USA my girl friend in Germany we were both in love with eachother . we had hard times in about a year or so that she wanted to come. one night at work i smiled and my boss asked me what was so good that made me smile I told him she is dreaming about me , later that night I was at home and I was playing a record from the moody blues and the name of the song was YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME ANYMORE. When suddenly I heard her voice saying I HEARD YOU' time diferance it was 2am in the Germany and here was 8 pm at the time that I was home and heard her voice it was 7am there when she woke up . later that morning us time I called her at home and talked to her I told her that she was dreaming about me twice that night and she said it was true, then i told her that the second time she awoke yelling I heard you . All of this she said that it happened and she asked me how i new . I can't explain but i knew Ok do you believe in that , do you believe that this can happen at the exact time as it happened. there is a lott more about that that happened when i was there in Germany that year before . I had a feeling that we were made for eachother . I can tell the whole story if you are intrested . can you please answer me . My email adress is heinrich@hotmail.com. THank you
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 99 04:03:41 GMT
To: cybrgbl@deltanet.com
From: DeltaNet Form Processor (formpro@www.deltanet.com)
Subject: Feedback and or Questions
The field values for the form received were:
___________________________________________________________
Name="Heinrich"
email="heinrich@hotmail.com"
comments="Hi I wrote you last year about June I believe it is all a ? I was the man who's wife left and that was close to commiting suicide. this is just to let you know how things are now. At the present I AM DOING FINE , at least I am clear of mind. there is still tension but life goes on. I am sorry to say that I did attemted to take my life, but all of this is behind me, and I will never be that stupid again. there are things in life that are more important then such crazy things like that. there is still very little comunication between my wife and me not through my part. more so through her the kids I only have seen them for maybe 48hrs. since they left she won't or does not let them come yet they are only 5 miles from the house. I am supposed to have the kids every other weekend but she seem to find all kinds of excusses. People have told me to fight this but I am tired of fighting I have done that my whole life I need some rest. As for the future If the marriage does not work out then I will pack my bags and go back to the old country were I am from. (Germany) my whole family is there at least I have support there that I can't seem to get here. It is sad to say that after 35 years in the states and making my life here, I would go back, but there is nothing here for me anymore. I chalk this up as an experiance of life a hard and expencive one. It is scarry to go back after 35 years but it is and would be better for me. My family is checking things out in Germany for me about jobs and if I can make it back there. I am fighting for costody for the kids but if I do not get it then it won't be much longer after that and I bid every one here goodbye I do thank you for responding to the first letter, when I was in such a bad shape. I really believe I would not be here now. thank you. there are stil some good people out there. before I go back I will let you know again thank you. Heinrich
PS I hope all of this makes sence to you."
How is life treating you?="better all the time "
Findout="I was looking for you"
Age="53"
City?="Detroit"
State?="Michigan"
Country?="USA"
recipient="cybrgbl@deltanet.com"
thankURL="http://www.rjgeib.com/about-me/guest/thank-you.html"
_____________________________________________________

      Dear Heinrich,
      I am so glad to hear life is treating you better. It sounds like perhaps a good plan to move back to Germany; a change of scenery is sometimes all it takes. They say that when God closes one door another opens up: I trust it is this way for you.
      I am glad to have been able to offer you a "hand," so to speak, in a difficult moment of need. Maybe someone will do the same for me when I am in similar straits.
      Be well.
      Very Truly Yours,
      Richard Geib

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