I’m applying to college – Part one

About a month ago, I gave myself permission to start thinking about thinking about college again.

You see, every year or two I swear that this year, I’m going back and finishing my degree. And every year, i don’t do it. It hasn’t been until this fall that I finally understood what’s been holding me back.

Me. And Attention Deficit Disorder — or as I like to call it, ‘non-linear thinking’. I see the whole picture when I start to think about something. It’s like having a bird’s eye view of the world, the future, and the internal workings of everyone who might be affected by this idea. And I get paralyzed, because I don’t know where to start. Everything has to get done. IMMEDIATELY. So I choke.

Ahem. As I said, a month ago I gave myself permission to start nibbling around the edges of the problem: how to go back to school. I put blinders on my inner eye and focused on one thing, and one thing only, which was mapping out a first step to going back to school. I thought about the hurdles (money, time, attention span of a gnat) and the benefits (check that box on the job application!, fix a failure, gain more confidence).

My first panicked flirtation with old, self-defeating patterns began when I started wondering about how on earth to choose an online learning program. I couldn’t imagine doing the research to find the right one, because in my (weird, not wholly logical but always amusing) not-line of thinking, I couldn’t imaging where to start! I’d have to research all of them!! But my new, confident voice reminded me of the best lesson I have learned from being a single mother and being ADD. I asked for help.

I talked to a friend who is almost finished with an online Masters degree. How did she choose her online university? I asked. She did it simply and logically, by beginning with the universities in her area, universities whose reputation she knew and trusted, and looked to see if any of them offered online learning. I immediately abandoned all thoughts of massive research and turned to a university practically in my back yard, one I thought had an online program and that I KNEW offered college credit for life experience. I looked them up on the Internet. They have online degrees in my field. I filed that information in my wonderful, weird brain and gave myself permission to continue thinking about thinking about going back to college.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll describe how I totally tricked myself and before I knew it… I’m not thinking about thinking about applying anymore. Scary.