It was thirty years ago this month (May) that I made one of many radical changes in my life. I quit college one year short of graduation, packed up my meager belongings and set off for Florida. You might shrug and go 'Yeah? So? Big deal!'. Well, it is a big deal to me.
Thirty years ago, I had come to a point in my life where nothing was adding up for me. I was a junior in college, having transferred from a college that Id adored (in Massachusetts) to one that was large and impersonal (in New York.). I was just one more number on a page at a college that at any given time had about 10,000+ students attending this school. My prior college had about 1,000 students all told. Wow, talk about from the fire straight into the frying pain! Yikes! Culture shock!
Anyway, my family had already made the emigration south to Florida from small-town Connecticut, the prior fall. My grandfather still lived in Connecticut while the rest of the relatives were scattered all across New England. Most of my friends had already gone to other places. The plan had been for me anyway was to finish up my college education in New York and then either find a job up there or elsewhere. That had been the plan anyway. We all know what happens to the best laid plans, don't we?
I hadn't counted on how desperately unhappy I became at school. I really felt like I was in way over my head. In retrospect, I think that I should have thought things through a bit better. But when I was in my 20's, such insight didn't come easily to me. I had to learn it, often the hard way. It got to the point where I began to seriously not care what became of me and as my unhappiness grew, I just went crazy. I began to cut class and fell behind in my studies. I fell in with the wrong crowd, kids that were doing things that I'd only read about such as staying out all night and partying into the wee hours.
By May 1983, the school year had ended and I just had enough. I went to the registrar's office at college and formally withdrew. I got my transcripts and they told a sad tale. My GPA had slipped way down. I just knew that I wanted to get out of there so bad that it didn't really matter. Luckily, I wasn't that cut off from my family in Florida and they encouraged me to come down there and live with them.
I've often heard that when people come to Florida to live that they are running away from something. That well may be true in my case, I was just running away from poor life choices. I made my way south alone. My car was packed to the rafters with all my stuff. It was sort of an adventure and I loved the independence it gave me just to do that. I felt very grown up as I made the 1200+ mile trip.
I moved in with my family into a home that I had never really lived in. The last time I'd lived with them, we all were still in Connecticut and in a familiar house. It took a bit to get used to. It was a hard transitition, moving back in. I immediately felt about ten years old again and for me, after living three years in two different colleges independently...let's just say it was like oil and water.
I was expected to get a job once I got to FL and pay rent which was only fair. It seemed that no one wanted to hire a kid with no experience. A lot of these places also had the idea that since I had a year left at college that I'd quit and go back, leaving them in the lurch. I finally was able to get a job through a job agency and had to pay a fee to the agency to be able to work.
When the dust settled after I'd moved here, I felt that I'd made a grave mistake. If I had felt out of sorts up in New York, it felt even worse in FL. I still felt as if I didn't really belong anywhere. If I wasn't working, I was out at the clubs partying the nights away. And the worst part of all? I wanted to move back up north. I was just twenty one and pretty much made most of my decisions by what felt good at the time or by being rash and making snap judgments. I didn't have any goals for the future. I didn't know what I'd be doing in five years nor did I have anything mapped out. I didn't have a clue. And I was scared.
My brother decided to take a trip back up North to spend time with some of his friends during the summer. I leapt at the chance to go with him. So along with him and a friend of his, we took his car and headed back up there. We spent a good three weeks up there and then we came back to FL. I got another job once I came back, one that paid better.
By year's end, I finally had my own place. My grandmother moved in with me to help with the mortgage payment; she lived with me for ten years. For me having my own place was the best thing in the world. I think that knowing that I was responsible for paying bills in a timely fashion helped mature me as nothing had. But even with all of this, I still was horribly homesick for the north. I was homesick most of all for all the friends that I'd left up there.
Most of the vacations I took the first few years while living in FL were usually in New England where most of my friends still resided. Looking back, it took a good four years before I really felt at home down here. Now, all these years later I still feel at home here. In fact, my roots are so deep here that it would take an act of God to get me to go anyplace else.
I believe that as I've grown older and learned how to deal with the world better, I have become more thankful for a lot of things. I've learned to appreciate things and take stock of the ways that I'm truly blessed. I've finally put down roots here in FL and have made some lasting and valuable friendships. Now thirty years on, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
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