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1) You know when you go to the doctor’s as a kid for your annual physical and they ask you what you want to be when you grow up? I’ve been saying, “a writer”, for as long as I can remember.
2) Fall 2018, I started at York University for screenwriting. As the only undergraduate screenwriting program in all of Canada, with a mere 10 spots, it is renownedly competitive. I never expected to get in—let alone to be the sole member of my program to receive a talent scholarship based on my application and portfolio.
3) 3 weeks into York, I was questioning my decision. 2 months later, I dropped out.
4) Fall 2019, I started at Laurier for business. It felt like home immediately.
5) The time in between bullets 3 and 4 has been the most challenging period of my life todate.
(You can skip this, but I think it’s interesting)
I sometimes ask myself if I’d be as “successful” as I am today if I hadn’t been born in January. While Capricorns are touted as notorious hard-workers, painstaking perfectionists, and ambitious bordering on pushy, my query is not motivated by astrology or any cosmic predestination. Between nature, nurture, and necessitarianism, nurture is the clear winner to me every time. But with the systemic advantage of an early birthday, the lines between nurture and nature have become a little muddled.
There’s an interesting concept called the birthdate effect where the oldest children in a grade or group—who tend to be more emotionally and physically developed—are more likely to be deemed talented and consequently receive enhanced training opportunities. From there, the birthdate effect is amplified by the addition of these development inputs, in what is known as the cumulative effect. With encouragement and positive feedback, kids develop the confidence to work harder, and subsequently persist by seizing more challenges for growth.
The birthdate effect has been shown to have lasting impacts in academia, leadership, and athletics.People born closer to the beginning of sports leagues cut-offs are more likely to become professional athletes. This holds true across a variety of sports in a variety of countries with different cut-off dates. In academics, the effect lessens with time, but relatively older students generally perform better in school, and are more likely to go to university than the youngest members of their cohort.
Some studies suggest the birthdate effect may havemore to do with the development of self-esteem, a preference for competition,and risk attitudes than the access to enhanced training that leads to the development of hard skills. Students who place higher in ordinal rankings compared to their peers have higher self-confidence and tend to be relatively older. It should come as no surprise then that people born right after school-entry cutoff dates are overrepresented in a plethora of characteristically competitive leadership positions, ranging from high-school team captains and club presidents to managerial and political positions like CEOs and senators.
Starting first grade, I was almost a year older than some of the kids. When a year is nearly 1/6th of your life, it becomes a huge maturational advantage. Deemed intelligent and talented early on, I benefited from that relative age bias and was nurtured because of a greater perceived potential. I was taught to believe in my “innate” abilities because others believed in me, practice more to hone them,and rewarded with praise accordingly. Eventually, this nurtured a cycle of achieve and acclaim. Young and impressionable, I internalized that validation as a defining facet of my identity. I was smart. Smart was me. I needed to work hard to maintain “me”. As I grew up, my motivations became more intrinsic when I developed a sense of pride and gratification from that success. Doing well felt good. It meant that I was something and I wasn’t letting my potential rot dormant.
What does any of this have to do with dropping out of university? Arguably not much. But it paints a pretty picture of the genre of upbringing I credit for the worth I place on academic performance, even if the timing of my birthday played little to no partin that at all. The fact is I don’t have any inherent wealth of motivation that makes me more driven than the next person. What I do have is a honed history of high expectations that—at times—pushes me to aim higher, but also amplifies how hard I can fall. Dropping out of university felt like a huge fall from grace.
When your identity and self-worth are so closely married to your scholastic performance, the loss of an academic arena is disorienting. I felt like I’d lost my sense of self. Silly as it seems, I didn’t know who I was without school or the hum of numeric and alphabetic goals to consume my time. And with less time expensed by school, I could devote more time to indulging my feelings of failure.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like a huge deal. I’d be starting at school again in less than a year’s time. A year is nothing at 18. 1 Christmas, ½ an Olympic season, ¼ of a federal election cycle. But I can’t stress enough how my perception of having failed clouded my ability to see the big picture. It’s easy to reflect back and remember all the angst and self-doubt and feel terribly melodramatic. Everything worked out. I’m in school again and I’m happy here.
I have these odd moments though where I feel rattled by insecurity. When I underperform or when I see my friends and people my age surpassing the milestones I should’ve hit by now, like the first “real” job. And I remember that 18-year-old girl who felt so lost and inadequate so acutely that sometimes I even become her. For me, it was more than just feeling like I’d failed, but the underlying fear that I would fail again. That Laurier would not be any different, that university wasn’t for me, and that this linear path I’d been led to believe was the key to a successful life was not mine to follow. That this interim feeling of lostness would become my new normal.
I was wrong. And even if I hadn’t been wrong, my thinking was wrong. There is no instruction manual for success. I didn’t fail by deterring from the path I expected myself to follow. I am not worse off because of that decision. It takes a lot of guts to leave; and the time between clear-cut, shiny degreed goals was not lost simply because I felt lost. Ultimately, dropping out of university was the best decision I’ve ever made, even if I didn’t know it at the time and even if it felt like the worst.
Here’s why:
I’m not going to be troubled by what-if questions. I tried and I knew with certainty it wasn’t forme. I didn’t spend another 3.5 years figuring that out and trying to convince myself to stay somewhere that simply didn’t fit. Just like going to York gave me the certainty that film school was not what I wanted, mustering the ability to leave York gave me the certainty that I could not possibly have stayed. I am grateful for that sense of peace.
The fact that a temporary change of plans could derail my sense of identity so hard made it painstakingly clear that I needed to re-evaluate my priorities. Although I excitedly awaited the moment I could finally return to school, those 9 or so months were heaven-sent. For the first time in my life, I had this huge block of time to confront the notions I hadn’t even known were holding me back. I wasn’t tethered to any external source of self-satisfaction. Purpose and fulfillment had to come from within.
So, I started working out more, reading books for pleasure again, taking myself out on excursions downtown to find content in my own company when I was just existing. I learned a lot in those 9 months. I can make tofu taste good. My lower back is so strong. Work-life balance is something I value. I am successful without school. And above all, I am resilient.
Leaving isn’t quitting and quitting isn’t failing and failing isn’t bad. Say it to yourself again. It’s taken me a long time to accept that I didn’t fail at screenwriting just because I left and an even longer time to accept that if I had, failing is okay. The English language alone has dozens of idioms and phrases that paint quitting as the antonym of winning. Famously: “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.”
But it’s a gross oversimplification. Winners leave, quit, and fail. That’s how they learn to win. Sticking to something that’s not inherently working doesn’t make you persistent; sometimes it just makes you afraid. It took a lot of courage for me to leave York. With that came a greater sense of trust in myself, my intuition, and my judgement. I am more confident in my decision-making and more open to change because I am not as scared to “fail”. It’s not that failure is something I’m no longer capable of. But that the thought of failure doesn’t hold the same power over me that it used to, because winning doesn’t mean what it used to either.
Spoiler alert: not everything you learn in university is valuable. But learning how to do those things because they still need to be done is an invaluable skill. I think a lot of students have this shared mentality that every aspect of learning needs to have a clear-cut and foreseeable payoff. And the aspects that don’t are deemed illogical, futile, and become the subject of routine complaints.
There were lots of times where it was tempting to give in to the collective complaining and begrudging sighs of my peers—and that’s certainly not to say I never did, because I absolutely grumbled. But leaving university made me more grateful for the educational opportunities I do have, and I’ve come to realize sometimes we should learn just for the sake of learning.
Post-secondary education is a chance to become more well-rounded, broaden your horizons, step out of your comfort zone, and all the other platitudes. Take advantage of every opportunity to better yourself and expand your knowledge of the world. Worst case, you learn something new and adopt a more positive attitude that enhances your success. Best case, you find underlying value and delayed gratification from the learning concepts you were so quick to dismiss as useless.
Let’s look at my mathematical proofs class as an example. While it was an incredibly fascinating course, it was also challenging, and I struggled to see any applicable outside-of-the-classroom value in being able to derive complex theorems. But then I took a computer science course and decided to pursue a minor. Binary concepts from my proofs class flood my head as I code. I’m reminded of logical argument structures whenever I problem-solve or debate. I am a better thinker because of a class I, at the time, resented having to take.
While some tasks maybe bound to feel like an unavoidable chore, I am choosing to be there everyday. That’s liberating. I’m not in school because it’s the expected next step after secondary education, the linear approach to life. I am there because I want to be there and because I love to learn. This attitude has given me a greater sense of control in my education and the value I choose to make out of it. I am in charge of my life.
And for the things I’m not in charge of…
Cliché as it is, I can’t control what happened in the past. But I can choose to be open-minded about my future. Choose to reject the linear norms I’ve grown to expect from myself.
What nobody tells you about leaving is that you can almost always come back. For me, coming back doesn’t mean returning to York, but the dreams I abandoned when I left. Screenwriting school wasn’t for me—I know that for certain—but that’s not to say screenwriting isn’t. Maybe someday I’ll wake up and decide to trade in the stocks for silver screens and storylines. But until then—what is perhaps equally as important as the knowledge I can come back—is recognizing I don’t need to do anything with that realization now. I don’t need to beat myself up over the past or decidedly close doors to the future in order to live in the moment today, with a sense of direction and purpose.
While I think the hands-on experience of fancy film equipment and expert teachings is invaluable, I do not think a career in screenwriting without these things is impossible. And this idea of second chances, of rejecting the status quo, of leaving being an optional round-trip and not a one-way ticket, is reinforced by the people I met in my time at York. It’s been 2 and a half years and I can still vividly remember the two 50 something year-old ladies in my film art lectures sitting in the front row. I think of some of the screenwriting friends I’ve met and loved: a former political science student (oddly enough from Laurier) two years deep into his degree, a 20-year-old interior design graduate, a speech pathologist transfer student, 2 26-year-olds with so much life lived to impel their words. They all left somewhere, maybe some of them even came back. But what matters is where they are now, in this moment.
Looking back, York is a fond but forlorn memory to me. I don’t know if I’d be able to say the same had I stayed. I can appreciate my time there for what it was and all it was not because ultimately, it gave me the perspective I needed to become a better version of myself, unhinged by fears of failure and embracing of the uncertain. I am braver because of that. Now were these life lessons worth $10,000? That’s an article for another time. But I don’t think I’d have it any other way.
Yours Truly,
