I'm better than a shitty bowl of soup

Had another lunch with my dad today. It's probably the 3rd or 4th one where we haven't fought. Again. Whoa...wait...what?

Well, I suppose you could say there was an "almost" skirmish. He made a passive aggressive comment about how my sister is a little more extroverted than my brother or I was in high school, and how she's joined the speech and debate team. Also, how she is more proactive about asking for help instead of letting things stew and just sit there.

He pointed out how I could have worked harder on my grades, and could have done more in high school and gotten a scholarship, but I didn't. And if I was so indecisive about what I wanted to do with my life when I got into college that going to a community college would have been better instead of going to a state university and wasting money.

I simply dismissed him by calling him out on his passive aggressive behavior and saying that I'm the one who's gonna be paying it off anyway, so why should he care.

And...well...here are my thoughts on the matter:

Could I have gotten better grades? Oh yes, absolutely. If I had truly tried, I probably could have been a straight A student. I probably could have gotten myself oodles of scholarships if I worked harder in the community service club at my high school, if I was more active in sports, if I had stumbled upon some life-changing make a world difference project and smiled into the camera showing my optimism for a better change for the world and believing I could do some honest bit of good.

Yes...I could have been your picture perfect pearly white smiling hopeful, sitting so proper in my school desk working on basic req papers and projects that would have absolutely nothing to do with what I wound up doing with my life later on once I figured out what I was meant for on this teeny hapless rock. I could have found a nice boy, I could have gotten my masters, settled, nurtured my crotch fruit to its full potential and repeated the cycle. I could live the Stepford wife life, minus the housewife idiosyncrasy.

Or:

I could choose the path where I smoked, fucked, and wandered my way to where I am now. Which involved a lot of cigarettes, weed, peoples' naughty bits, and putting my hand out to say "Hi. Nice to meet you." I did a lot of that, in one form or another. I did it when I changed my major 4 times, I did it when I met the people who I would come to call my best and closest friends, I did it when I found myself at an emotional/mental/financial rock bottom and pulled myself up by my bootstraps and continued trudging forward.

I decided to not take the easy way out and see what exactly it was I could accomplish on my own. Did that mean mommy and daddy abandoned me completely? No, I still got some help from them, and I am/will be forever grateful for that. And I plan to pay it back to them when I am in a place of career finality to do it. Or...y'know, when my paychecks are bigger and I can give them stuff back in general.

If I had gone to community college first, I would have met a whole slough of different people. I would have had different friends, different inspirations, different life experiences. Would I have become stronger through all that? Would I have come out publicly sooner? Would I have found my path to becoming an art therapist? What would have happened?

The answer to that is an enigma. I know this. But I feel the need to fiercely defend what I've chosen to do with myself, nonetheless. Because according to my dad, the message I'm getting from him is that what I'm doing is "good enough". And not "good enough" in the way where you're crawling from the wreckage on your hands and knees after surviving a war-zone heart of gold kind of "good enough". I'm talking "good enough" because I wasn't doing anything better, so this is fine. Kind of like settling for the shitty bowl of soup in a restaurant that's alright because you figure everything else tastes terrible, so what's the point in trying to find a different restaurant that could be better? Or, heaven forbid, make the soup at home yourself?

I came from an easy upbringing. Not wealthy, per se. But easy. And I could have kept it easy, I could have just coasted on by. But I decided to take control and make my own decisions.

So...yea. I'm gonna be buried six feet under the debt I'll be owing when school's out for good. No, I'm not on any kind of scholarship. Yet. But am I still just "good enough"? I'd like to think I'm pretty damn amazing. I just want to believe it 100% of the time, and not just 60%.