Tweet your 16 year old self

This hashtag popped up on Twitter yesterday, and I watched as folks tweeted bits of advice (good and bad, but mostly supportive) to themselves at age 16.  It flittered around my brain throughout the afternoon, and I even tweeted a few pieces of advice to myself.  One of which was "drop out of school."  The more I thought about that piece of advice, the more I understood it to be a really good one.  If I could have gotten past the loss of self-respect (which I didn't have a lot of to begin with at that age) that quitting school would have engendered in me, quitting public school would have been a far better education than staying there.  I've been trying to think of a few useful things that I learned, things that served me well over the next 10 or 20 years, but I haven't come up with any yet.  I met some great friends, two or three people who enriched my life greatly and I hope I was as good a friend to them as they were to me.  Dropping out of school would have meant the loss of those friendships, which, in the absence of other good friendships, would have been tragic.  

I moved the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years of high school.  Moved from a suburb of Chicago, where I had been for one and a half miserable years and two tolerable ones, to sunny California, where the schools were mediocre and drugs were easy to get.  A few weeks before we moved into our new house one of the star football players on my school-to-be's football team was shot to death while robbing a liquor store.  

What did I learn my last two years of high school?

I learned to forge my mother's signature so I could get out of school "excused" whenever I liked.  I learned that getting someone to buy you beer requires parking outside the liquor store for ten minutes with a few friends with cash and good smiles.  I learned several dozen homes in my neighborhood and my friends' neighborhoods to buy pot at.  I learned that a hundred high schoolers can arrive at the lake at 10am on a school day in their cars and as long as each car pays its three bucks the parks employee at the entrance doesn't care.

I learned how to scroll obscenities across a computer screen in BASIC.

I learned that a Coke can half-filled with Southern Comfort at lunch draws no suspicion.  Ditto a Tupperware cup filled with jug wine.

I learned that ambition, creativity, and enthusiasm for learning are to be ignored, hidden away, ridiculed, or squashed altogether.

And I kept hearing that "someday" I would have opportunities, "someday" I could explore my interests, "someday" I could have what I wanted. "Someday" being, of course, after high school, after college, after I got "a good job."  

And the more I remembered what I learned outside the classroom, and the unintended messages I learned inside the classroom, the more I thought, yeah, I should have dropped out of school.  I should never have gone to that school, I should have gotten my education from someplace that would have taught me something useful.  Like the value of following my interests.  Like how to go to a paying job and still feed my passions.  It would have been nice to have learned *somewhere* along that part of my journey that my passions and interests were useful compasses to help me find my way to my future, and that they should be respected and nurtured, not sheltered and hidden.  The most important lesson I could have learned, that I've been figuring out for the past 25 years now, is that following my interests and passions *can* be compatible with earning a living.  One need not crush the other.   No matter what the "popular" (dope-smoking, beer-pimping, school-cutting) kids say.