Why the Hell am I going to college?

I am forty years old and have worked hard my entire life. I come from a working class family that never really mentioned college to me. My main rules of adolescence were to get C’s, work part time during the school year, full time in the summer, do not get arrested or get anyone pregnant, and graduate. During this time I never really looked ahead and the only future I saw was to work at a factory, save money, and maybe start a family at some point. College was not in my mind.  

After graduation I became part of the factory world. I was conditioned to believe seventy hour work weeks were normal and to do what I was told. Most of jobs I have worked involved hard physical labor, long hours, and sometimes injury. I did learn that through hands on training, paired with a decent teacher, one could learn how to do just about anything. At work I would get bored after knowing a job to well and would ask people how they did theirs. I like to learn but I hated factory work. I hated being under the thumbs of corporate overlords that could care less if you were caught on fire or bled doing a job for them. I took a break from that life to join the Army. I was there for three years and received a medical discharge when I became a Type 1 diabetic at age twenty-five. I returned to work in the factories again and hated my time in them for the next fifteen years. I was lured back for the money because I fell in love and wanted to be a good provider for my wife.

My wife is smart and she turned me on to reading. Who knew I could learn new stuff by reading books? At one point my wife decided to go to school for nursing. I worked my ass off for a few years so that she could go to school, become a nurse, then start a family. She loves being a nurse and I noticed that she enjoys going to work. I have never felt that way about a job, did not think it was possible to. We tried for years to have children and found that it was not a possibility for us. I became depressed.

The last four years of my factory days were working third shift in forty below zero degree freezers. I was very depressed and the only life I pictured ended in getting a gold plated watch from my employer’s, then death. I am a forty year old diabetic and probably only have thirty years or less left, so I decided to quit my job, live on almost nothing, get educated, to hopefully live a more free and satisfying life. This is why the hell I am going to college.