So I entered the local university while living at home. Sometime over the summer I ended up with a full scholarship because of my ACT scores. That first year was astounding, intellectually and personally. I had permission to study anything. I remember feeling every day like my life opened up, bursting and dripping petals everywhere. (This was, of course, before finals approached.) I learned more about more subjects that year than I had in the previous several years. I worked nights at a pizza place until about February — a job I loved — and then left to work at a small local newspaper. My grades were not high at all because I had never had to study before in my life. I didn’t really know how, and I was also very interested in both of my jobs and the people I worked with. I would cut classes to work or shoot photographs. As a result, I earned mostly C’s and lost my scholarship at the end of the academic year.

Of course I was shocked and amazed (just like my students are when they earn their grades), but it also made me try harder. My second year was mostly A’s and a few B’s. I took a bunch of required history courses that year: full-year courses in History of Civ and Art History, plus US History and a creative writing course. It was all good enough that I still remember what I took 11 years later.

Then, at the end of that summer, I fell into a terrible depression. Part of it was personal issues, and part of it was problems with the very unhealthy atmosphere at the paper. I quit that job and returned to pizza, but it didn’t help. That fall, I stayed out of school to figure out how to deal with things. Writing was part of the problem, since I felt worse when I wrote. I didn’t know what else in the world I would seriously study besides writing. So I cooked a bunch of pizzas and worked a bunch of temp jobs and kept reading a bunch of books about everything I was interested in. Eventually I started temping at UPS and — God knows why — I became fascinated by the shipping business. I got hired and stayed for seven years. One summer afternoon in the second year, I went downtown and took the GED. I was 20 before I got around to it. I didn’t bother to go back to college for almost another two years, and when I did it was because I couldn’t be promoted to management without a bachelors in something. The rest is history. (The details are in my literacy biography, if you really want to know.)

So, Youngest-Child-Of-My-Blog-Friend, that is how it worked for me. It’s thirteen years now since I dropped out. I’m one year into a Ph.D. I still think that leaving high school early was one of the best things I ever did. Staying another year in that school would have done me more damage than leaving — and leaving has done me surprisingly little damage at all. Here’s the thing: what you do in high school matters very little in the long haul, unless you’re lucky enough to be in a serious college prep institution. A high school diploma will get you precious little in the world these days. What matters is your college degrees. If you have a GED and are working on a bachelor’s or a master’s, nobody cares. The thing is to make sure that you have the wherewithal to keep working towards those degrees. Be certain, because if you don’t make it work you will truly screw yourself in ways you can’t even imagine. If you know you can hack it and you don’t care about senior rings or senior trips or senior prom, then don’t waste your time. Get on out in the world and learn about the big stuff.

And if it’s not a straight road, then worry some but don’t worry too much. When we moved up here last year, I went through a few months of regretting the time I spent out of school. I ended up telling one of the Most Seniorest, Most Scariest faculty members about it at a party last fall, and he said, “Why? You wouldn’t have known what your research agenda would be. You wouldn’t have been able to develop it the way you can now. Don’t ever think that was wasted time.” And he’s right. Those years I spent in industry taught me to understand people and situations and business. They taught me how to move through the world in a way that my colleagues who have never been outside academia can’t. They gave me options: if I wanted to go back into Business Development, I could gather up my old business plans and get hired pronto. If I wanted to haul off and go be an industry tech writer, I have the benefit of real-world experience on top of my degrees. Those years also made me the academic that I am, in many ways. They weren’t wasted.

Dropping out isn’t the right thing for everybody, but it was absolutely the right thing for me. I hope it works as well for you. You’re lucky (as I was) to have parent(s) who will support you, so listen to her. If you have the guts to make a decision as unorthodox as this one, then you probably have the guts to make it work. Once you’ve crossed over the line, it’s your job to make it the right thing. Take your grades more seriously than I did at the beginning, because I spent a lot of time fixing my GPA after I got serious. Make sure you’re not causing yourself future harm. Make sure you’re always moving forward, somehow. Progress is really the most important thing.

And do it your own way.