A Slow Turning

When I think about myself as a teenager or young adult, I usually cast that recollection as a more ignorant or naive version of someone like myself now. Every once in a while, that perception is challenged.

Today I signed up for web design classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). As I walked around the building to register and get my student ID, I recalled visiting the campus as a high school student. At that time I was hell bent on going to FIT because I wanted to be a fashion director for a department store.

I am so far from fashionable now, it takes effort to recall that I used to focus on it obsessively. As a high school student I was most likely the sole subscriber to ID and Women's Wear Daily in my suburban Maryland zip code. I grew up in a conservative community where my theatrical 80s fashion risks stood out. Whether it was positive or negative regard, I was considered stylish.

There was only one class in my high school that took a trip outside of the county, and I made sure I got into it. The class went to New York City where I visited the FIT campus and decided it was the place for me. Unfortunately, my parents, who cultivated the expectation that I would pursue tertiary education, declined to provide financial support for me to attend FIT or any other school when the time came for me to apply. So I went to a community college and then transferred to a liberal arts school. It turned out to be a seven year odyssey to earn my tuition and complete my coursework for a degree.

In those seven years, I changed a lot. What I learned changed me, but I was changed most dramatically by financial circumstances. I was poor and couldn't afford clothes, hair cuts, cosmetics, or fashion magazines. I tended to work at two or more jobs simultaneously, so there wasn't time for much primping.

In bitter moments, losing my job has led me reflect a lot on my odyssey and how I valued a college education. At the time, I thought a college degree was my ticket to employment. I made sacrifices with the expectation of future reward.

In the twenty years since I graduated from high school, the world has changed. A college degree is about as meaningful as the high school diploma was when I earned it long ago. I now hold a master's degree and am having difficulty finding a job.

The fact that I have invested approximately $130,000 in education and 20 years in work experience and can't find employment is depressing. But when I think about it, and I rarely do, the circumstance that really saddens me is that I changed in ways I didn't like to accommodate a job market that has failed me. In fact, I changed so much I almost forgot who I was and what my initial ambitions were.

To be clear, I don't feel pangs of longing to be a fashionista. Department stores are fading as quickly as publishing houses, so my career circumstances would be just as dire. My regret is a more diffuse remorse about the choice to pursue a less creative path. That an effort to pursue a career I would have liked was supplanted by an expedient plan to do what I could to pay for school. Instead of shaping my future, my future was shaped for me by my environment.

The fact is, few people have the resources to control the course of their lives.

It was strange to be at FIT today, and to recognize that in an odd way I am realizing a long-dormant ambition to attend school at that institution. Like much of what life offers as one wends their way through circumstances, this ambition is realized in a way that doesn't match my expectations. Yet, I take it as a hopeful sign that things will work out in the end. The result will probably not be exactly as I envisioned it, but the bones of the expectation will be present.