How My Dream of Going to University Put Me Down a Dangerous Path

I came for the knowledge, but left with values and expectations that weren't mine

My idea of university before my studies. Illustration by Canva DreamLab.

I decided to start writing here to find my way back to myself pre-university.

Back in the beginning-mid 2000’s, social media wasn’t as big as it is now.

You had much less insight in how other people lived their lives.

The path forward was still pretty homogenous: college/university straight out of high school, job, buying a house, family, work a steady job, etc.

If you did anything that strayed from this path, you were considered a deviant. Period.

I didn’t care because I wanted to get out of the cage that had been my life up until that point.

I followed the path that was right for me. There were never any questions.

So I did this for a little more than 10 years. It was great and it shaped me in ways that I can never truly comprehend.

Again, this was before traveling and ‘doing your own thing’ exploded on social media.

What I did was still considered bold at the time.

But I have always been a reader and a lover of books. I learned to read when I was very young.

And in my case, one of my biggest dreams was to go to university.

Not because of it being a stepping stone to a career or a high status job.

I never saw university as a means to something else.

It was solely for my deep love of learning.

To me, books and university was the symbol of learning to see differently. Learning new ways of looking at and understanding the world.

This was the most freeing thing I could think of.

Who doesn’t want to get out of their own heads?

This was the first time a dream of mine coincided with what society expects.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was about to have some unknown consequences a few years down the line.

I guess I had a distorted idea of the institution of university.

I saw it as this honorable academic tradition, “standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Paying respect and being humble of the craft.

Well, needless to say, this wasn’t exactly what characterized my time at university.

There were professors who personified this, and I’m deeply thankful for them.

But of course, the other students around me, being mostly in their early 20’s, most of them treated university as a means to an end. Of course they did.

How could they do any differently? These and similar values were in the drinking water at the time.

I’m writing about this because I want to focus on one thing:

How one goal of mine coincided with societal expectations and put me down a dangerous path.

You see, I started out never wanting to live the kind of life that was touted as the best way to live. It was never for me.

I had a goal that was, at least superficially, the same as one of the values touted by society, and somehow I slowly got sucked into a value system that wasn’t mine.

Spending so much of your time immersed in a specific environment, inevitably, you will absorb more than what is visibly taught.

It’s also about all the other things present in the environment. The invisible, everything that’s not said out loud. Everything that’s simply in the walls of a place.

I started to conform to the ideas around me.

Conform to the expectations that ‘naturally’ comes because you choose to go to university.

You know, specialize more and more.

Get a job. Get employed.

Continue with doing research in academia.

Work your ass off for nothing in rigid status hierarchies.

This is not what I signed up for.

The closer I got to graduation, the more my fears and anxiety grew.

I knew I hadn’t chosen this.

This wasn’t me.

I chose the knowledge, not the expectations and values that also come with the university experience.

Almost a year after graduating, I have finally managed to rid myself of those expectations and values that aren’t mine.

It’s been a struggle. I believe that many of us struggling with being stuck with ideas and beliefs that aren’t our own, know how hard it can be to let go.

And what a relief it is when you finally succeed because you didn’t give up and conformed.