Anyone who knows me personally and very well knows the following story:

I was enrolled in the University of Phoenix and lasted maybe a whopping 2 semesters. I was newly married and a new mom so I was on a roll of accomplishing shit and decided I may as well get my education as well. I won’t knock anyone that has attended or graduated from UOP but I will say—I hate that fucking school and everything they stand for! Perhaps I will share all my reasons for the hate in another post, BUT the main reason I just could not get with it is because their curriculum was bs. Your “facilitator” teaches you everything in a whirlwind fashion, then they rely on the end product of group projects to determine your individual grade. (Did I mention that I think that’s bullshit—because that’s bullshit).

Long story short, I hated my group. There were way too many of us, only one other woman and myself were even remotely interested in producing good work, and there was no rhyme or reason to how we operated. Because my grade was at stake, you’re damned right I took charge. I did my best to try to bring structure and make sense out of whatever the hell we were doing. I felt like it was me against this tiny little dysfunctional world, but the alternative was to just leave things to chaos and let my grades suffer. In the end, as we moved on to another class, the “facilitator” tried to keep us together but one by one the group members raised their hands and publicly announced their desire to remove me because of our interactions from the previous class. In the previous class, I did 75% of the group work and I had to ride ass hard to even get the collective 25% from the rest of them. I put in the work, and I still don’t care if they didn’t like my methods—they should have had the balls to speak up! Come the next class they kicked me out of the group and shortly thereafter I withdrew from the school—group work is not for me.

To this day I still feel like I did everything necessary to carry the group. No one else was stepping up as a leader and no one seemed to be able to work cohesively. We all tried to contribute portions of the work and compile it but if 7 out of the 8 people contribute shit, you’re going to end up with a pile of shit as your final product. I sound really tough about it now, but at the time it really broke my heart. I was 22, I had missed out on the college experience and I was really looking forward to having a decent one at the University of Broken Dreams Phoenix. For weeks I would check my email nonstop, just waiting for at least one member of the group to send me some kind of apology at least for publicly embarrassing me by kicking me out of the group. That email never came. This is SO SO sad—but I still look for that email, hoping that maybe someone realized that I was simply doing my best and perhaps my intentions were misunderstood. I tried way too damned hard to be accepted. I put in too much work and effort for people who ultimately did not care and I had absolutely nothing to show for it.

So…as things go with my very favorite musician friend. I feel as if I put in so much work and time and patience and I really expected to yield something good from it. I’ve never really been that ambiguous with a person before, either. It didn’t matter to me to necessarily be with him, but I just liked the dude enough to want to function with him in some kind of capacity: friends, acquaintances, relationship—whatever. Perhaps it says something about me that most of my relationships with people in general have to end in one big dramatic, knock-down, drag out fight. It was epic and draining, and while I got say what I wanted to say and I feel like there was closure—it bothers me that things had to end that way. However, sometimes you just aren’t compatible with people, or you don’t want the same things and you have to be sane enough to stop fighting for it! I was fighting for someone who didn’t even bother to show up to the war. I am really not all that sane, but as things came to a head I just had to drop it AND my incessant need for validation. Just as I still monitor my emails for a note from the University of Phoenix group, I still stalk my email and texts from ex-love interests expecting them to say to me, “I didn’t get it at the time, but I do now.” I don’t want to hear that I am right—just that someone understands me.

Justify me, vindicate me, validate me…