My Academic Journey, and What it Has Taught Me

Some would have you believe that only the prodigies of the world and those born into affluent families achieve their goals or reach success. I would argue that you can start from any point and, with the right gumption, reach any goal. Your path might look different, it may have more turns, road blocks, and restarts, but you can achieve whatever you're willing to work towards.

In my opinion, the most valuable traits you'll need to posses when you are striving to reach your goals are perseverance and fearlessness. Don't be afraid to fall or fail. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Be afraid of what you might miss out on if you never try at all or if you never get back up.

My academic journey, some might say, started a year too soon. I was a summer baby, and I ended up being foundationally behind my peers as a result of being enrolled with the students who were, in majority, older than me. My parents had been advised to enroll us (my twin sister and I) a year later in school, but they chose to go forward with enrolling us anyway, knowing how important it was for us to interact with other kids our age (when I grew up preschool was not as commonplace as it is now.) Being a twin, I definitely clung to our twin bond when it was more comfortable for me to do so. Which was all of the time. It could be argued that, academically, that "held my sister and I back." In first grade, we were both, quite literally, held back and made to repeat the grade.

I grew up in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, in a middle class town that offered me every opportunity to catch up, as long as what they thought I needed was in fact what I really needed. And, despite having good teachers and a "progressive" curriculum, I just wasn't being taught at the pace or in the way that I learned best. In the end, whatever the reason for any my delays, I wasted a lot of my academic career feeling as if I had slept through every alarm. I was playing catch up. I was "behind" even after repeating first grade, and there were a few times where my peers whispered words like "stupid" behind my back. As if my delays were because I wasn't as smart as other kids. All of that stuff that others might view as a great head start, a leg up to success, didn't leave me anywhere closer to actually having success. All I ended up with was the belief that I was a complete waste of time and resources.

Now, before moving on, I need to address the fact that I think my parents made every choice they believed was best for us at the time, given the information they had. They were both really involved, and my dad even joined the PTA and later became mayor of our town in hopes of addressing certain key political and educational issues. My parents did whatever was needed, enrolled us in whatever extra programs were available, and got us tested for delays as was recommended. Looking back, I don't think that they missed a beat. They were faced with limited options, uncertain of the outcome, and hopeful that they had made the right choices. And I truly believe that they did make the right decisions based on the limited resources they had back in the early 90s. My sister and I just weren't considered academically advanced for the majority of our formal education, and it wasn't until later that I really came to understand why that was.

My sister and I joined Polytech programs in high school at the first opportunity, Autobody in our junior year, and Sports Medicine in our senior year. We also signed up for all of the same electives in hopes that we might be in the same class. Luckily, one year that actually worked out to be the case. In addition, senior year we both took Honors Anatomy, which felt like a stretch. Didn't they know we weren't "Honors material?" As I said, the first reason we took these classes was so that we could be together. In school, twins are separated early on, and I would argue that, for us, that played a big part in why we struggled academically. We just enjoyed each other's company. The competition between us was different than the competition between our other peers. We always worked to keep each other up, to never leave the other behind, whereas competition between classmates can be ruthless and cut throat at times. Which, for some, is a great motivator. For my sister and I, however, it worked the other way. By separating us, we weren't able to cheer each other on and we had to focus on simply getting through it, rather than thriving together.

Once we entered college, my sister and I signed up for all of the same classes again. Every. Single. Class. We took together. And we began to excel academically, as we had already experienced a taste of in high school. I got straight A's in English, which had never EVER happened before. And on the side we both got to writing our own novels. It was like my brain was no longer being held hostage by what "the system" thought I needed to thrive academically. Where they thought my twin sister and I would hold each other back, they ripped us away from the one person who could keep us moving forward on the right path to success. While I didn't initially plan to homeschool my children, this element played a big role in why I later decided to teach my children at home. Where their strongest bond was each other and where their academic pace was the right pace for them to thrive. In addition, college, especially once I started taking online classes, taught me that I am fully capable to teaching myself.

I started seeing that my capabilities were not quite as limited as I had been lead to believe all those years ago. I grew confident in my ability to self teach. To develop my own skills at my own pace. Failure no longer felt scary, it was just part of the process. I wasn't afraid to struggle or start from scratch, because for me that was what my process looked like. But it wasn't just an opportunity to grow and bloom academically in the way that fit my personal needs that helped me break free from the cycle I was in. It had a lot to do with the examples I had as well.

When I looked up, I saw men like my father who started his own conveyor engineering business from the ground up. After some years of designing conveyor systems and outsourcing the instillation, he later taught himself how to build and install those systems himself. In addition, he brought my sister and I up helping him on the job. He never had any sons, but that didn't matter, because girls are just as strong and capable of hard work. In fact, he hired my step-mom as his hardest working and most capable crew member in the conveyor engineering business. That's actually how they met. He needed someone who was up to the job and he hired a woman without so much as batting an eye. The companies he installed conveyor systems for regularly knew that Walter and his girls were going to get the job done.

As I said before, my father also saw areas in which our town needed improvements to fix systems that were broken, so he joined the town committee. He has never been someone who simply talks about what needs to be done or what is wrong, he's always been the kind of man who gets to work and fixes it.

My father-in-law, who spent years working in retail on the business side, started his own bathroom and kitchen renovation business from scratch. He taught himself all of the skills he would need to become the best in the business, and that's what he did. Both men had successful careers until they reached an age where they were ready to retire and work in less physically demanding positions. In fact, my dad is mayor of his town again, because he's never been able to sit idly by when he knows that he can help make things better. Even though all of his girls would much rather see him enjoy a relaxed retirement instead. Upon reflection, I realized that the examples set out before me were of men who were self-made, and it didn't take long to realize why I had taken so easily to doing the same in my own career.

My mom was the complimentary counterpart of who my dad was when it came to raising us, and when it came time to raise their family, my step-mom was the same. Both women were willing to make sacrifices and to put family first. It was hard at times, as they had hopes and dreams of their own, but family came first. I never saw that as a weakness or as having less value, and I wish that wasn't a common thread of thought when society discusses women's roles in the family. Of course not all women stay home, but from my perspective, my mother and step-mother were heroic in their decision to do so, just as mothers who work are heroic for making that difficult decision. Collectively, watching the examples I had created something of a hybrid in my own life path. I have worked very heard to be self-made in my career as an author, but I have no shame in having taken a step back to raise my kids. Now I find myself in a sweet spot of being able to do a bit of both.

My journey and my examples have lead me to a place of self-discovery and reinvention. I'm not afraid to start over or to try new things, and I'm not afraid to put myself out there. That's a far cry from who I was growing up, and it's thanks to the ability to see myself and the process more clearly. It has been a long road. Though I'm only thirty-two, it feels as if I wasted a lot of time believing the wrong things about myself and my potential, and that just feels like too much time. But now I see, as I've completed seven novels to date, that I'm in the right state of mind to believe in the truth. That I was made for this, and that I've always been meant to pursue my writing no matter how hard the journey may be.

I look back on all of my hard work and I look forward knowing that I'll never stop working hard and I have peace in knowing that I'm already living in my success story, because this is a girl who can get knocked down 99 times and get back up 100. Don't let someone else define where you are in your journey or measure your success, because chances are, they're measuring by the wrong standard. If you want to be successful and achieve your dreams, don't hand over the definition of what that looks like to someone else.