Fear, Happiness and the American Dream: the Difficulty of a Simple Life

The funny thing is that when you are drifting, you are still going somewhere. To make some extra money to help pay my tuition, I started tutoring at the Writing Center. I found that I missed working with student writers. Working with them one-on-one in a situation where I wasn’t “in charge” and I didn’t have to give them a grade, I developed confidence in my ability to help students become better writers. I realized that no matter how I had felt about it in the past year, I did know something about writing. I had something to offer.

That same year, I took a creative non-fiction workshop and a non-fiction hypertext writing class. While I still love writing fiction, I realized that I had some skill writing non-fiction and that I really enjoyed it. I decided that I wanted to do a creative non-fiction hypertext as my thesis. C.S.U. has a graduate degree in Communication Development in the English department that would allow such a project, so I switched programs. It was finally starting to feel like I fit. I even reapplied for another teaching position. I was still scared, but I knew I had to try it again. I also decided that I needed to find a therapist and try to fix some of the things that had been holding me back.