The Old Guy in CreCom

Deciding to go back to school at the age of 33 wasn’t easy.

I still remember graduating from high school back in 1998. I told myself all I needed was one year off from school to find a job, make a little money and do some travelling. Well one year turned into two and two turned into fifteen. Before I knew it, my twenties were long gone and I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.

But I had grown up.

All around me friends had established themselves with degrees, mortgages, families and commitments.

I was still kind of drifting. I didn’t know what to do, what I liked to do or what I was good at doing. Not to mention that lingering voice in the back of my head that would regularly make up excuses as to why I couldn’t and shouldn’t make a change.

One day I was sitting at my desk at work staring at the clock, trying to mentally force the minutes to pass by faster. Just another day at the office, working a mundane job with no opportunity for advancement. I zoned out, wishing away the next 25 years so I could just retire.

Wait a minute. Retire? Did I just think about retirement?

That’s when it dawned on me that I was destined be the guy in his sixties looking back on his life saying things like:

“If I could do it all over again, I sure would do it differently”.

Why was I selling myself short? There was still plenty of time to do something great. I’m always telling people to live without regrets, so now it was time to walk the talk.

Later that day, I enrolled in the Creative Communications program at Red River College. After a lengthy screening process, I was in. I was actually going back to school.

The first day was a little intimidating. Not surprisingly I was the oldest person in the class. Several questions began to arise.

How would I fit in with them?

Do we have any common ground?

What the hell is Snapchat?

Thankfully my fears were put to rest very early on. These weren’t the self-absorbed entitled youth I had heard about. These people were vibrant and interesting. A highly creative group with a great mix of standout personalities. A CreCom camaraderie was established almost immediately.

I went from being a good to writer to realizing I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. At the expense of my ego I began to accept some of my failures and committed myself to learning from my mistakes. The instructors in this program are outstanding and their criticisms are always constructive. The more I took their advice, the more my grades improved.

Now I’m doing things I never thought were possible. I’m writing screenplays and editing video footage. I’m writing articles for the school newspaper and creating advertisements for magazines. I’ve co-written audio dramas and dabbled with graphic design.

I can even diagram a sentence……why that’s important I don’t know, but I can still do it.

The point is I challenged myself and found out there was more to me than I thought there was. I have a much better understanding of who I am and what I’m capable of, and for the first time in a long time I feel like I’m on the right track.

Maybe this was how it was supposed to play out all along.

After all, I doubt the 18-year-old me would have been ready for a course like this.