Upon receiving a rejection letter from a Masters Program

Joel and Education have had a tricky history for their nearly 38-year relationship.

This is neither me nor mine. I found this nice photo on the internet, but it does look quite a bit like my mother!

I've jumped through quite a few different modes, models and institutions (though thus far, I have avoided institutionalization, though I often dream of writing from a sanatorium). My family moved a few times during my formative years, but mostly it was several transitions in trying to find the "right fit" for my oddly developing mind.

I first entered school while living in a suburb north of Montreal. Though I spoke fluent French with the kids in my neighbourhood, English was the primary language of home, and also the first language of my learning. I don't remember much, perhaps just the first few strains of bullying and trying to fit in, trying to make friends, an incident we shall call my "first kiss"* and a few times having the delight of my retired-teacher grandma fill in as a supply teacher. (it's cool when you're in kindergarten).

*(I don't remember her name, but one of the cuties of my class, a rather popular girl too, once asked me if I had ever kissed a girl. We were alone between two giant piles of snow on the playground, and with nervous delight, I told her I hadn't. She then stuck her pointer finger in her mouth like a lollipop, pulled it out and pressed it on my lips. I was confused about the kiss, but what I was not confused about was that I was now a Man.)

Once we moved to Ontario my parents thought wisely to make the most of my advanced skills in multiple languages by placing me in "French emersion", a term I apparently did not take lightly as one of the more memorable stories involves my teacher telling my parents that I refused to switch out of french even during "English class". During this era, I think in grades 2-3, a few profound complications arose. Mostly my parents dealt with a lot of my inability to focus, likely given to day-dreams and the initial budding of my meandering mind. I mostly just recall getting outright yelled at a few times by one of my teachers due to repeatedly losing my pencil. I don't know where it would wind up, whether one of the other kids was having a laugh, or if it just didn't seem to me to be all that essential. Nevertheless, you "learn" unfortunately young that you're not doing it quite right, this thing they call "school", this thing they call "learning" and ultimately this they call "being smart".

In the years that followed my parents switched me to a private school, one with Christian leanings that supported our religious interests and boasted the usual: smaller class sizes, more one-on-one teacher involvement, more support. Unfortunately, the transition was a bit jarring as private schools like to pride themselves on being a bit academically advanced, and I can't say for sure, but I do blame my poor penmanship on switching into "handwriting" midswing and finding I never was able to muster "fine motor skills". I've been told I write "like a left-handed doctor", which I understand is quite the insult.

Nearing the end of my primary school years, or into what is sometimes called "junior high", I began to suffer from regular intestinal discomfort. I never really experienced vomiting or something dramatic, just persistent nausea. I simply would often start the day feeling sick enough to not be able to really engage with my studies. I spent many afternoons in the nurse's station awaiting my mom who was often sent to pick me up and take me back to the safety of home. Eventually, I missed several large chunks of school, with homework sent home along with me. I think halfway through my grade 7 year I pretty much dropped out entirely. In grade 8, my mother attempted the great work of homeschooling me, while I went through a variety of health tests to find if there was simply some food intolerance or ulcer interrupting my young development.

That year proved pretty exhausting for my mother, though in the end, we made it through. I returned to education for the high school years with pretty mixed results. These years are pretty hellish for us sensitive souls, with much to bully me about and far too much confusion, grief and out-of-place emotions firing through my heart. I went through repeated seasons of illness, missed classes and the like.

I think near the end we weren't too sure if I'd be able to finish. I was convinced I needed to quit, but my father, much to my angry reaction, insisted I press on to completion. (Sorry Dad, we fought pretty badly at that point, but I am grateful for it now).

Okay this one is me, and my dad. He's probably saying something like "These are the necessary evils of life" a thing he said often, with the best of intentions. You can tell I didn't like to hear it even then.

A memory that I now kinda cringe at, is a conversation I had with the vice-principal when it became apparent that I did not plan to attend graduation. (I feel bad for this now, but it does somewhat elucidate the state of my mind at the time). Over the phone, she argued that this was an important occasion, and perhaps a celebration of accomplishment and a final send-off to my friends and fellow students. I recall replying with a bit of a cool detachment, that when freed from prison the inmates do not return a week later to celebrate with the guards. I think she was pretty quiet after that.

After a year or two of wandering, I followed my parents who had moved back to Montreal. The following year I applied at a bible college, where I hoped to study Music Recording and to dive more headlong into my exploration of spirituality and philosophy. Over the course of that first year, I had the full rollercoaster experience. The thrill and fun of summer camp like social experiences, a girlfriend, dorm life, and youthful shenanigans.

Academically I showed again the motivational bent of my capacities. If I was excited about the class I would do reasonably well, if not I would barely scrape by. In the second semester, with a complicated attempt at love underway, my anxiety and depression steered me into a head-on collision with instability. I dropped out after that semester, with my first failed class in my academic history and a renewed sense of struggling to find my place.

That relationship, and the anxieties that rose with it, blossomed into a marriage, and then eventually a divorce. With a decade's worth of education of a different, less credentialed sort. The soul searches and finds more wilderness where it had hoped to find a home.

When COVID spread its uncertainty around the globe my wife and I privately separated and spent the next year disentangling. In the following months, I found myself reassessing my direction on my own. Wanting to make the most of life's wounding up to this point, finding my endless patience with the darkest corners of the human experience, I wanted to engage more fully with the study of the human mind, the human heart and, perhaps, the human soul. I decided I might make a decent therapist. There was little that shocked me, and I was frequently energized by trying to comprehend the motivations that led others (and myself) to make the choices, to feel the feelings, and to ask the questions that we do.

In my mid-to-later 30s, sitting in the classroom again with mostly young women trying to get into the helping profession, I was faced once again by my old foe, Education. Now, with the maturity to meet my frustration with curiosity and not just let my rage fly, I once again found myself an outsider. Not only in my greying beard and thinning hair line, but also struggling to memorize scientific terms and statistical equations all while trying to find meaning or beauty in abstracts.

I'm no fool. I know that well. I've scared off enough folks with what they deemed my advanced intellect, but these forms of "learning" mostly exchange a lot of hoop-jumping and rule-following for a professionally rolled piece of paper, that says "Yes, you have given enough to us, you may ... graduate!".

Meanwhile, on the many shelves of books that hide in most corners of my house, are volume after volume of profound wisdom of the ages. The struggle of self-discovery, the mystery of transcendence, the poetry of love, and even... the study of the psychology of the human mind!

But! Textbooks must be bought sold, and read through, despite their exhaustive descriptions and lack of more applicable information. I have read many pages of many textbooks over the last few years, but I'm not sure how much I have been able to learn. Most of what I've learned about the human experience has been through... human experience! Wrestling with the three dimensions of real people, and their stories, less in predictive statistical likelihoods.

If you're a research-delighted scientist, I salute you, you do some incredible work, and you probably look great in that crisp white lab coat! Thank you for testing these hypotheses. Thank you for critically investigating our methods and ensuring our work is as good as it can be.

But as for me...! I hope to find the means to expand my knowledge where it is ripe for expansion! To find time to read and study, to learn and grow. To acquire skills of becoming a compassionate healer, with words, with a listening ear, with hope! Until then, I must find the right hoops to jump through. I must bow beneath the yoke of another man's burden.

And someday... hopefully before I am supposed to retire, I will go about the work that I truly feel called to do.

So I applied for a master's in Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy. I want to synthesize the scientific foundations that inform therapeutic practice with the profound dimension of spiritual realities. I have beliefs (they change, chimerical in nature, searching for the source of divine meaning) and I want to use them to embody a more holistic approach to healing. It is in answering the existential questions that I find the ability to live most fully. Not just minimizing symptoms of depression, anxiety or addiction, but fulfilling the great call of the soul itself.

So, not this year. I go back to the books, and unfortunately not to the books that call to me, but the books that make demands on me. Swimming upstream towards a vocation that might finally feel like a home for me.

I feel like at times I have been whining here... a good deal of "boohooing" (down in Whooville). But I have lived my life as a square peg being forced into a round hole. It is unfortunate that being "Square" usually means the opposite of not fitting in, or approaching things unconventionally. I often worry at times I will feel this way for the rest of my life. Or I fear that I will never really find acceptance in any place other than (hopefully) in the quiet centre of myself.

I suppose I write this all here as it is a therapeutic practice just to express it all, and it has also become a new way to see myself as a bit of a writer m'self. Another vocation that I hope will find its place, though my energy gets so easily swept up in earning enough to sustain my room and board.

I write this too because maybe you are someone who has felt at times similarly. Have felt like there is little place in society for your kind of being, your way of feeling. Yet you also, I hope, have grown the slow confidence that I have found, knowing that you do have a considerable bit of something special to offer, something that is perhaps even precious in this world. It should be invaluable, but unfortunately one must do a bit of the hard work of wandering into the deep woods and finding there one's home in the world.

Thanks for letting me rant. Hopefully, I'll simply find myself rereading this in a year or two and say: "Poor little fella, don't get so discouraged, every season has its lessons, there are wonders afoot and wonders ahead."

Keep watch! Keep hope.

Gratitude somehow, despite.

Uncertain, even as a child of the world, and overalls.