tryptech said:
who wants to sit for 2-5 years in school without any friends?
Who wants to sit for 40+ years at a ratty job accruing no real retirement and having no benefits or interest in one's work?
Dude, I'm paying my own way through college and I'll tell ya it's no walk in the park. I'm almost 23 still working on a 2 year degree. I'll finish, but not as fast as I could have if I had a full ride.
Honestly though, I would not exceed a 2 year vocational program if I were you. Maybe later but not right now. Become a Vascular Technologist or an Underwater Welder or something where you will actually find a job and make pretty good money. The 4 year degrees just aren't finding jobs right now.
Yeah, the awkwardness sucks. But if you want it to it can go away. Until last quarter, classes for me were a nightmare to actually attend. Everyone already knew each other in every class I had it seemed like, and they never needed to talk to me. But finally, in this spring quarter, I decided "fresia it, I'm going to talk to someone whether they like it or not and keep doing it until I'm part of the class."
So I did. And surprisingly it worked.
In Biology I ended up with a regular lab partner who I had a lot of fun with as well as several people I could say hi to and talk to pretty regularly. It wasn't uncomfortable at all. I had a friend in a class, finally! After how many years?! I was elated. She didn't know it, but she probably changed my life by working with me. It's also relevant to this discussion to mention that she was a very attractive (if married) woman, and being around her several times a week for two hours at a shot was a sort of exposure therapy. I realized that attractive women
don't actually have a proximity-triggered electrocution defense system that will fry me with lightning if I stand too close. They're people too, and they breathe and bleed just like I do.
In Speech, it was a different crowd...there were only two other students besides myself not still in high school. Those two I found were easy to talk to. One was a woman my age who was just enchantingly beautiful. I would've asked her out if she wasn't engaged. The rest, as I said, were high school kids taking early classes. I found that while we seemed to talk in class, it didn't go REAL far beyond that. We were simply too far apart socially due to the gap in age, experience, and maturity.
You have to be bold to break out of this shell, and it's one of the most difficult things for one to do. But we have to try, or nothing else will ever come to us.