Well that’s it. My time at Kwantlen is officially over. Took me around 45 mins to do the exam (and it would have been even less if the listening portion (where we identify songs and stuff) didn’t have to take so long) and then it was home again by 9 am (ish). So now I am home, and I have to deal with the fact that my second home, Kwantlen, is behind me now.

I always get emotional at times like this. It used to surprise me, but not any more. I am not exactly a world champion at letting go of things, and even though I am super stoked to be going to VFS, saying goodbye to good ol’ Kwantlen makes me sad.

End of an era, I guess. The era was only eight months long, but I have changed so much over those eight months that it seems like a long, long time.

When I first stepped into KWantlen (Richmond Campus), I was fragile, anxious, timid, and unsteady. Going up and down the staircases to get to the main building (because the only way to have underground parking in Richmond is to declare the second floor to be Floor 1) seemed incredibly taxing, and it was all I could do to keep it together and make it to my classes.

And then there was the whole drama with getting my student loan. Half of that was my fault for not getting the wheels in motion sooner. But I had so much going on emotionally that it took me a while to find the mental space to worry about it.

The other half is, of course, irrationally and gobsmackingly slow bureaucracies. Six weeks to get my photo ID! Six weeks for them to process my disability status form, which they had to do before they could completely my application! That’s twelve weeks, AKA three months, spent just waiting for stuff.

Maybe it’s more than fifty percent their fault, come to think of it.

But Kwantlen was nice enough to wait, and then I got financial help from my sister, and then the loan finally came through after my first semester classes were already over.

It was in the second semester that things really began to change. I remember the moment things changed vividly. I was stressing out as usual about the upcoming semester during the winter break when suddenly things shifted and I said to myself “Wait a minute…. I got this! I’m not going to be doing anything new or different. I will be doing the same things I just finished doing. I have this handled!”.

And just like that, I relaxed in a way I hadn’t done in decades. I stopped stressing about it and confidently entered my second semester with full confidence in my ability to handle it.

It’s impossible to overstate what a huge difference that was for me. It had been a long time since I had done anything with that kind of confidence. My overactive and neurotic mind would produce panic and anxiety over patently predictable things. I lived in a constant state of fear and low level paranoia. No wonder I was so miserable!

And my self-confidence has only grown since then. It’s a slow and unsteady process, to be sure, but every day, I believe in myself a little bit more.

Having been accepted into VFS, and having the writing dude say such nice things about my writing, helps a whole heck of a lot. At last, there are people out there who believe in me. I had lived for so long in a state of suspended potential that I had forgotten that was even a thing. I did my best to believe in myself, and certainly I did well enough in school – Linguistics aside – to warrant that.

I kept reminded that most people can’t waltz through school getting straight As without studying or trying very hard, so there must be something special about me. And later I realized that I have written millions of words and done hundreds of videos and most people hadn’t done that either.

Basically, I am in the process of learning to accept that what I have done has some kind of value. Not monetary, of course, but I have learned a lot from doing it.

And VFS is going to teach me how to refine my work into something professional and slick and appealing. I have been refining my own ore for a long time now, and I am a much better writer than I was before I started blogging like this, but I still lack the wherewithal to go back over things to improve them.

Well, in VFS, I won’t have a choice. I highly doubt I will be able to bowl them over with my usual half-assed sloppy work, and I don’t just want to pass the program – I want to impress the fuck out of everybody there. I am aiming for the stars, here, and you don’t get to where I want to go by half-assing everything.

So I will have to shape the fuck up…. I hope.

I will always be grateful to Kwantlen for all it did for me. And I say that knowing that my education there was not exactly of the highest quality. That doesn’t matter now as I am not going to be trying to apply that education to my work anyhow. And I met a lot of cool professors, learned neat stuff, got to sample science courses (Psych), creative writing courses, history courses, a journalism course, a political science course (ick), and of course, my usual diet of philosophy courses.

I am even glad I took Linguistics. I went through hell there, but I survived, and learned to make peace with not automatically being awesome at something. There are certain things this magnificent mental machine of mine just can’t do, and that’s okay. Nobody is good at everything.

And the fact that I stuck with it to the bloody end when I was struggling the whole time through is something of which I am quite proud.

So farewell, Kwantlen Polytechnic University. You might not be the best school around, but you were there when I needed you, and I have grown much stronger since I started with you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.