My neuropsychiatrist told
me later that they estimated I had lost up to ten points in my IQ. Practically
speaking, after my senior year in high school, I had lost almost an entire
point on my GPA (my senior year GPA was 3.2, the lowest it has ever been). I
had trouble processing and retaining information. Severe migraines continue to
complicate things for me, including relationships, athletics, and confidence.
At one point in my fall semester after the seizure, I was on the verge of
dropping out of school because things that had come so easy to me just a few
months before were now near impossible. A Beloved English teacher reassured me
and basically saved me from dropping out of school. When I spoke to another
neuropsychiatrist the spring of my senior year he looked at my grades and my
medical report and told me flatly that if he had seen me the previous June or July,
he would have recommended that I not go back to school. He seemed surprised
that anyone was able to do as well as I had done following so massive an event.
I turned to my mom and said, “Does this mean I can take a year off before I go
to college?”
I pause here when I tell my
students this. “Do not tell you parents that Mr. Smith gave you permission to
drop out of school or to not go directly to college!” I have to cover myself.
“Do remember that you are being taught by someone with three college degrees;
if you fail at something or if you suffer some sort of setback, remember that
if your stupid theology teacher can come back, so can you!” I reassure my
students that if they are willing to be patient with themselves and if they are
willing to let other people help them, they can recover from those setbacks.
Before you go and say that
I took a year off to “discover who I was”, just stop it! I was taking the year
off to get healthy. I definitely told
people that I was taking the year off to “find myself”, but, really, I just
wanted to rest and recover. It sounds like it was an easy decision. But let me
put it this way; I was a good student with a lot of gifts. Everyone in my
family went to college, and all of my classmates were college-bound the summer
after we graduated. I am not sure if there was a single person that I knew that
had ever take a year off before going to college. I was supposed to go to college and become a famous cosmologist! Instead
of going away to college, though, I settled in my parents’ basement. I think of
this as “forced humility”. But it was in that humility that I was actually able
to begin the long process to “find myself”, although not intentionally.
Reflecting on that year
(half as a year, as it would turn out), and thinking in terms of theological or
Christian Anthropology, I did begin to “find myself” in that humility.
Remember, if God is self-gift or humility, then to act in humility is to live
out the image and likeness in which we are created. I lived in my parents’
basement! Do I need to say anything else? All respects to millennials who are
in their 20’s and living in their parents’ basement, but I was supposed to be
in college! I even had a chance to be playing baseball in college, making new
friends, learning new stuff, and working toward being the next great
theoretical physicist. Maybe I was a bit full of myself. Maybe I was being
punished for my hubris. Or maybe I was just being invited to be humble…to be
more like what we are all made to be. Maybe I was “finding myself,” albeit in a
way I did not plan.
(He watches over the garden sometimes.)
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