This may be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever confessed to, but I so very badly miss being in an active university environment. I miss having my work read and criticized by egotistical professors, I miss getting into screaming arguments with other strongly-opinionated students (and sometimes professors) about things that absolutely didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, I miss the engaging conversations about ideas and revolutions all these other inconsequential luxuries that a well-rounded wealth of knowledge provides.

I know, coming from someone who failed out of university for three solid years and took 7 whole years to acquire an undergraduate degree, it sounds really ridiculous.

But the truth is, at my core I’ve always loved learning and the idea of school. When I was just starting kindergarten, my mom got me my very own desk and I loved sitting at it for hours doing “homework”, sometimes until the sun went down and she called us in to dinner.  (This usually consisted of me coloring in a coloring book or “practicing my penmanship” by scribbling my first name matched with the surname of my favorite New Kid on the Block.) I loved the feeling of accomplishment that I felt when I made decent grades and my parents eagerly encouraged my advancement in school.

Soon, I was that annoying kid in my class who was always making straight A’s and always acheiving a little more than what was required. In kindergarten, I read more books than anyone else and my teacher took me and my bestie to dinner and a movie. (Funny story: She was supposed to take us to see ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ but forgot to check the local listings at our town’s tiny Cinema 4. So, instead, she took two 6-year-olds to see ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’. True story.) In first grade, I scored 100% on every single spelling test I took all year. In third grade, I did more voluntary book reports than anyone in Mrs. Moore’s class and I won her annual Multiplication Bee. What’s even more nerdy and embarrassing is that I didn’t enjoy the adulation as much as I genuinely loved learning. I consumed piles of books and delved intensely into researching any little thing that fascinated me and I was quick to try to engage my peers in discussing what cool things I was uncovering in my extracurricular explorations… And, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I got picked on so much.

Then, around middle school, I started dealing with my first devastating depressions and my grades plummeted. My poor parents thought I was just being teenager-y but the truth was that I’d lost all interest in anything that had excited me. I dragged myself through school, hid away in dark colors and layers of self-loathing until college when it all collapsed into a drunken, insane mess. Gross.

During that time, there were glimmers of my real curiosity that would peek through my own shroud of doubt and fear. One semester, I even traveled abroad and performed in an award-winning comedy troupe, but I wasted many nights of my adventure shaking and sobbing in overwhelming attacks of panic and depression. This sudden relapse ultimately caused me to fail out of every class I’d been succeeding in until the last two weeks of my stay and managed to set me back tremendously in my general recovery.

Only during my last year of college, after I started receiving adequate treatment for my depression did I start to recapture that sense of excitement with trying new things and learning everything I could about anything that piqued my interest. My senior year, I threw myself headfirst into bellydance and kayaking and student organizations and my classes. I stopped missing classes, and started talking and engaging in friendships with other BA’s that roamed the halls with me daily. Although my habitual inner-critic was working overtime to scare me back into my hole, I pushed forward and was able to really enjoy myself for a change. I really felt I’d recaptured this part of myself that I hadn’t seen since I was very young and had honestly believed had perished with age. And, even though my new friends picked on me about it, (Ahem…Hayley.) was glad to see my inner nerd return.

You know the rest of the story. (Through working with various student publications, I fell for the student magazine’s sexy art director who whisked me off my feet and had me pregnant and engaged within months. Two years later, we’re married with a one-year-old and living happily while working in our respective fields of expertise. M’aawww…)

I think I was too excited to really notice how much I missed school when I first graduated, because I was so busy being excited about my pregnancy and hurriedly preparing for my daughter’s grand entrance. I read every bit of material about the stages of pregnancy and parenting and What to Expect and thoroughly exhausted myself with diving right into this new, uncharted territory that I didn’t have time to notice that I missed deep, theoretical conversations about linguistic history or Victorian-era scandal.

Now, after sitting at home with a baby every day for a year, I find that I am suddenly ravenous, not only for human interaction, but for mental enrichment. I’ve finally started making time for pleasure-reading again, which has found me reading contemporary classics and popular spiritual new releases, but this just doesn’t seem like enough for some reason. I’ve even gone so far as to create an online writer’s workshop among some friends within a popular social networking site in hopes to recreate a sense of growing through critique that I so enjoyed about being a literary English major. (I know, totally nerdy). More than once, I’ve discussed starting or joining a book club with friends, but my time is so limited I can’t actually make that sort of commitment just yet. So, right now, my enthusiasm for learning is being quelled by a couple hours of The History Channel after dinner during the one night of the week with Greg and the few hours of reading I get after Chloe goes to bed on the nights that Greg has freelance work to get to. I’ve ordered a few books from Amazon to learn about various topics of interest, like the Women’s Movement or the Sexual Revolution or, most recently, The Gnostic Gospels.

I hate the idea that I’m wishing my daughter’s life away but, sometimes - especially when things are particularly unglamorously stressful on the homefront - I really look forward to the day when I can go back to school and really throw myself into graduate work. I feel like with the enthusiasm I have for continuing my education, it won’t be hard to recreate the momentum I had at the end of my undergrad career. And I know in a few years when she goes off to school I’ll have more time for selfish things like a career and more education, but being that patience has never been my strong suit, I’m having trouble accepting that I might just have to wait that long.