I'm choosing now to speak out against what I feel is one of the worst periods of my life, a point that still reverberates to me now a good four years since graduating. Mainly I'm ready to speak now because before now I'd honestly be unsure of what I'd want to say. Sure, I could tell someone that my time there was "bad", but describing some place would hardly disclose the deeper reasons on why there was bad, and further, such a vague description would only confirm the intuition that I didn't know what I was talking about.
And for awhile, they were right that my views were blank. And for awhile, I was painfully aware of such inadequacies.
Following college I was homeless, for a whole fucking year. The perfect icing on the shit cake of loneliness, ridicule and self-loathing: to be on food stamps, to not really be sure where I would sleep, to aimlessly look up and wonder what I had done...
The good news I suppose is that hitting rock bottom forced me to knock off the high-and-mighty bullshit of "knowing that I was good and they were bad" and recognize that my powerlessness in the situation was in no uncertain terms permanent and a direct function of the personal weaknesses that I had been harboring. My powerlessness in fact was made worse through the belief that, although my situation was dire, it could be solved through some plan or list. The pattern of thinking that I could commandeer reality to fit on my notepad was, in my extreme state of poverty, laid bare, its ugly mug looking at me straight through.
That broken thinking, the top-down approach that does not ever work except by and through the swindling of an untold number of suckers like me, is the thinking that I am now ready to assault.
And, if I am to introduce my case against Willamette University in one thought, I would say that WU is nothing other than top-down thinking manifested in its entirety. My fight against WU is a fight against a thought.
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