My education Story

Your help with my student debt goals would mean the world to me! I’m raising $80,000 to pay off my student debts as well as start fresh with my new wellness business.

I’m tired of the cycle of borrowing from one source to pay off another and essentially never getting ahead. The hardships in my life so far aren’t going to stop me from reaching my goals.

Throughout my education journey, I’ve been dealing with physical and mental health disorders, addictions, and constant turmoil in my life. Even if finishing school isn’t a possibility for me right now, I want to get this pile off my back and breathe again.

I’m from the Red Deer area, and going from a small town to the city for school was a big change. I started out in Kinesiology and General Management, then switched to Marketing and Philosophy, then just Marketing. I’ve learned a lot that is helping my new business, and I am grateful for the experiences and friendships.

My post-secondary story involves mental health and medical crises, family strife, heartbreak, constant relocation and moving from job to job. The government is no help as tuition and cost of living goes up and up to the point where some may never pay off their loans in their lifetime. I refuse to let that happen to me.

My personal mission statement is to empower people to help each other thrive. I’m using my education to help people with barriers just like me find occupational wellbeing so that they never have to go through what I went through.

I’d appreciate any amount you’re willing to contribute to my goal. If you’d like to support me through my content creation work and receive some perks, please join my Patreon community!

Read on for a snapshot of my education journey so far. I’m sure you or someone you know can relate.

My Education Story

I was valedictorian of my graduating class after struggling to find a schooling method that worked well for me. I’ve always been passionate about philanthropy, charity and entrepreneurship. So, because off my top grades, I got a lot of scholarships right before I started university. I left right out of high school, as expected, at what now seems like the impossibly young age of 18. But university is a completely different animal than high school, and I was far from prepared.

I’ve struggled with various mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety, since I was a child. However, I was a mostly high-functioning hot mess with some very bad coping strategies. Most people didn’t even notice the turmoil inside of me, and dismissed it if I tried to bring it up. “You’ve got so much going for you,” was the common refrain from teachers, counsellors, and family when I tried to explain that I was struggling.

But the environment at home and my relatively small high school meant that there were always people relying on me and expecting me to show up places at specific times, which was the external regulation I needed to force myself to function.

The move to a different city and to a school where I was just one of a thousand faces meant that suddenly I didn’t feel the pressure to keep it together. And honestly, since I spent so much of my grade school years on the go with extracurriculars and independent projects and getting top grades, I was burnt out.

Suddenly being by myself with no one demanding my time other than the few hours that I was at work or school, I deflated. All those mental health disorders were suddenly too much, and I could no longer use busyness to hold back the tide. I didn’t want to anymore. I was so, so tired.

You might know what I mean. My whole world was suddenly different, painfully lonely and confusing. There was a bright spot, though. Before leaving high school, I’d reconnected with an old friend from a summer camp I went to as a tween. Now, with all this newfound freedom and crushing loneliness, I started spending more and more time with him, travelling back and forth from Lethbridge to Calgary to see him.

Because I have a genetic condition called Marfan’s Syndrome, I have glaucoma, displaced lenses (now removed), retinal issues, and heart problems. I had to continue driving myself to the regular appointments in Calgary that my mother used to take me to. This was the perfect excuse to see him, at first. The utter relief of not feeling alone was addictive, and we soon became codependent.

As a borderline individual, I couldn’t see how problematic aspects of our relationship were. All I knew was that I just couldn’t be alone. Neither one of us was focusing on school anymore, and we both spiralled into poor decision making. I became pregnant during my second semester, not even a year after leaving high school.

My Marfan’s Syndrome really affected my pregnancy. I had planned to switch to online school to finish my degree while parenting, but that was a mistake. Honestly, I should have realized. I’d done a year and a half of online school for grades 10 and 11, and struggled with the same issues of loneliness and lack of accountability back then, too. I’m not sure why I thought things would be different when I was already struggling with in-person university.

Because the pregnancy was so dangerous and the baby’s health wasn’t looking good, I was forced to move to Calgary where he would have better care. It’s about 2 hours from Lethbridge, so basically an all-day trip. I had been travelling almost weekly back and forth from Lethbridge to Calgary for appointments anyway, but during one of these routine examinations, I was told I couldn’t go home. They admitted me. I spent a week in the hospital, trying to do my homework without going insane, worrying about my baby and the fact that all of my stuff was in another town two hours away.

But my boyfriend rallied our friends and got our stuff temporarily to his grandparents’ place in the country, not too far from the city. We had a place to stay while we looked for a house in Calgary. A nurse drove out there to check on me and the baby on a regular basis. I wasn’t allowed to stay on my feet for long, and I had to check myself for contractions multiple times per day. It was still difficult to try and do my schoolwork in this new place, because things were constantly in turmoil and chaos around me. But I kept working at it.

Finally, we found a place just a few weeks before the baby was born. It was difficult for me to avoid standing while everyone else did the work of moving us into our new place. I didn’t like needing to use the mobility scooters at Wal-Mart when we went shopping for groceries. I consider myself an independent person (codependency notwithstanding) and feeling so helpless and useless was a nightmare.

A few weeks after we were settled in Calgary, the baby was born by emergency c-section. It was traumatic for everyone. I’d be told that because of my heart issues, I may not survive. But we both survived. He was born at 30 weeks, weighing less than two pounds, and he was in the hospital for 10 weeks.

Those two and a half months felt like they would never end. We visited him every day, and leaving him was always hard. When I wasn’t pumping breast milk (six times a day!) or at the hospital visiting my son, I kept trying to work on my school. Assignments and textbook readings were a challenge, but I kept at it. I even retook a couple of the courses I had failed when I was going to University of Lethbridge.

It was hard, though. There were a couple of nights where I refused to go to visit my son in the hospital because I couldn’t bare having to leave him again. It was quite a low point.

Our son came home in November. Suddenly caring for a high-needs preemie on our own without the hospital staff was a huge adjustment. But we were rigorous with his routine and writing down everything he did: eating, pooping, constantly throwing up almost everything he ate. We did everything we were told, but he didn’t thrive. We were accused of neglect by one of the nurses who was visiting our home.

Dealing with child services was a trauma, especially because we were doing everything we could to help our sick baby. It was also difficult because there are a lot more resources in Lethbridge than in Calgary for young single parents and children. We were still grateful for what we did receive.

Still, between pumping breast milk AND taking turns feeding the baby and changing him and doing laundry and changing diapers and going to the store and trying to keep the house somewhat tidy and needing to boil and disinfect everything after each feeding or pumping session, I continued to work on school as best as I could.

It was a lot, especially on my already unhealthy relationship with my boyfriend. I began making plans to leave, and someone told me about a maternity home for young single moms. After a particularly bad fight where I no longer felt the baby was safe, I did leave. He was about six months old.

So we go to this new house, and I continued to try and do my exams and assignments while navigating an on-again, off-again relationship with the baby’s father. I failed some courses, got honours in some, and had to redo a few of them more than once. But the support I got from the group home was amazing.

I still struggled with depression and other issues, especially since I wasn’t sleeping well due to anxiety. Things got better between me and the baby’s father, and we had a pretty good schedule going for weekend visits. However, when I didn’t have my son, I deflated. I couldn’t get out of bed. It was the same thing when he was going to daycare while I was supposed to be working on school. I wasn’t sleeping at night, and during the day I had no energy to do anything, When I was alone all motivation just rushed out of me. I did schoolwork here and there when I could, but usually the anxiety or numbness would take over.

At one point, I just shut down. The workers at the home tried to get me out of bed but I refused, and finally they called an ambulance to take me away. The baby had to come, and it was a frustrating few hours of him not being in his own bed and me trying to manage in the most stressful situation. All to finally be told that I had mild depression.

I more or less recovered from that ordeal. My son kept growing, and eventually he got too old for the housing program we were in. Thankfully, there was a spot opening up at another maternity program. This was in a small apartment building. I’d have more independence and more of my own space. So we moved in there, and my son went to a new daycare. I did school on and off, continuing to leave my assignments and studying for exams to the very last minute, of course creating even more stress.

Things got marginally better with my baby’s father, and we decided we were going to get married. I moved out of the maternity complex after almost a year, into a really great condo. Well, is was great on the surface but had a lot of issues. Still, we had the wedding there, and it was a bit of a shitshow, but we were happy for a while.

Then the darkness crept in again. My depression was still dragging me down, and at this point I was limping through school, sometimes going weeks without doing a single thing. My borderline made me more and more anxious about my already tumultuous relationship, and I was often controlling, jealous, moody, and scared. I still tried, and was still excited about what I was learning, even if the follow through of assignments and exams was a lot to handle.

I had a community-based marketing assignment where I was supposed to help the Mustard Seed, but it ended with me ghosting them and holing up in depression and anxiety. I finally quit school.

By this point my marriage, only a few months old, was basically over. We were still doing the on and off thing, but the writing was on the wall. I managed to get a grant-writing job for a summer camp (they are still a huge support to me to this day) and another job working as a fitness consultant at a gym.

I was proud of myself because it felt like a real job, with my own office and everything, even though I didn’t have a degree. But it was my first time working in a few year. I certainly hadn’t worked full-time in a while., and now I had two jobs. The gym was in a mall, so sometimes I’d bring my grant-writing work to do in the morning or on my lunch breaks.

While working these new jobs, I was also juggling a move to a smaller condo by myself. It was my responsibility to clean our old house. Although I had some help with the actual move, I remember going to that house on the final day before I was supposed to give up the keys. The house was empty but an absolute mess. At this point I was used to moving and cleaning, because this was my sixth home since graduating from high school. Even before that my family moved all the time when I was a kid.

But I looked at that mess, and inside I felt so heavy, and like such a failure because of quitting school and having my marriage end. Going back to the place where we’d been married and had a few months of relative happiness as a nuclear family was more than I could take. I sat on the stairs and looked at the place where I thought I would have everything I dreamed, and I cried. I didn’t clean a single thing. I left, and of course got a huge deduction from my damage deposit.

So, I worked for a few months, continuing to struggle with the hours and the sales grindset/gym bro atmosphere. My social anxiety was at its peak. I began looking for other jobs.

Eventually I found one that paid better and involved working with kids at a really cool startup. A series of unfortunate events renting a car for the out-of-city interview made me late. I still got the job.

It was challenging but I loved it. I liked my bosses. I’ve almost always liked my bosses, which is problematic, but we’ll get into that another day. Long story short, I always become terrified of letting them down, and then my productivity suffers, letting them down anyway. Then I quit. This time, however, they beat me to it; I got fired for the first time in my life.

But before that, COVID happened. Only a month into this new job, and everything shut down. Man, was that a weird time. I was making bank from my stimulus payments, buying all sorts of things, feeling really great. And I also had all this free time on my hands. I decided I really wanted to try and finish school. So, I wrote a letter to my school saying that I had gone through some challenges but was better now and dedicated to finish my degree. They let me back in.

Eventually, the startup asked me if I wanted to work with them again on a new venture. This would involve working in one of the founder’s homes, putting packages together for customers.

At first, I biked there because I was afraid of covid on the bus, but when I started taking the bus again, I would read my textbooks during the ride. I could read and take notes just fine, but when it came to assignments and exams, I would always freeze up. But I did my best.

The job, however, was not going well. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my ADHD made it basically the worst job for me. Sitting in a room putting together identical packages in an assembly line for hours. I like that sort of thing occasionally, because I find the order soothing, but being able to pay attention to each tiny detail was very challenging. No matter how organized or methodical I tried to be, and no matter how patient the founders were in trying to help me make the packages correctly, I still messed up, and they still got complaints from their customers, and that was the first time I got fired from a job.

At this point, I was also running my own startup. It was a non-profit, Christian, marketing and communications agency. I always felt guilty about being behind with it. But I was helping charities and entrepreneurs and it was great. So after I lost my job, I tried to focus on that while I grappled with the fact that this time, I’d managed to screw up enough to get fired.

I’d had so many jobs at this point, ever since I started nannying full-time at fifteen. I had struggled in most of them. Usually, I would push through until some sort of deadline or circumstances like getting pregnant or going back to school would give me an end date.

Leaving was always a sigh of relief. The longest job I had was a year and a half working at a gas station in high school. To this day, that is still my longest job.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how everything seemed to be going wrong in my life. The government slowly started opening things up again, but I was shutting down. I spiralled fast. Eventually, I was so numb and suffocated that I couldn’t see a way out. One day, while my son was at preschool, I swallowed all the pills from every bottle I could find in the house

In the hospital, I recovered from my overdose and continued to manage my business, explaining to my team that I was dealing with “liver problems.” I was embarrassed, especially when I got committed for more than a week. But that’s when I finally got my borderline diagnoses, and it really resonated with me. When I got out, I tried really hard to get my life back on track. I was going to try and get some help.

I’d given up on ever finishing school at this point, but I wanted to be able to do something with my life. I wanted to be independent, for my business to thrive, and go on to create more organizations to help people flourish. I wanted to help others find balance at work, and I pushed mental health a lot for my team. We checked in with each other, had prayer sessions, game nights, and team-building activities. But of course, it’s easier to give advice than to take it. As soon as I signed out and was alone, I fell apart.

Things got bad again. I’m not even sure what lead to it this time. It’s just this pervasive ebb and flow of soul-crushing emptiness, loneliness, and sense of failure that completely overwhelms me at times. A few months after leaving the hospital, It pushed me down so hard that I couldn’t get back up. During my son’s first month in kindergarten, I attempted suicide by overdose once more.

This time I was hospitalized, recovered from the toxicity, and was committed into a different program that I liked a lot better. But the mix of drugs I’d taken this time really messed with my brain, and I can feel the effects to this day.

It took me a long time to bounce back. But the hospital had an online, multi-week outpatient program that I attended when I was no longer papered.

It was kind of like school, where we’d have four lectures a day and weekly assignments. Some of the people I’d met in the ward were in the program too, so it was nice to see them again. But there were days when all I could do was roll out of bed and force myself to turn on my laptop a couple of minutes before my first class. I was so tired. Also, working from home in any way was a challenge, nearly insurmountable some days.

I slowly recovered again. I started going for more walks, seeing my son more, and interacting with more people.

There were people in my life who were frustrated with me for trying to take my life again. After the first time, I got sympathy and questions about why I didn’t reach out sooner. After the second time, the general sentiment was exasperation and blame. It fed into my shame spiral.

I was still trying to manage my business, too. But every day was like a lead weight around my neck, and as winter drew near, things got harder and harder.

I had been talking with a woman who did respite for my son when he still lived with me. She was looking for someone to do respite for her adult brother. I’d been doing respite work in Lethbridge before I was forced to move to Calgary. I’d done it in Calgary while I was living at the maternity complex, so I found myself back in homecare yet again. That led into me doing respite with her for another family too, and soon I was working steady again. I eventually moved in with her, her fiancé, and her brother, and occasionally helped with cleaning, too. However, that didn’t last long.

At first, I thought it would be great, because we were all close in age, and she already knew my son, which should have made visits easier. But our personalities and habits clashed horribly, and on top of many other things that were going wrong in my life, my depression began to overwhelm me again.

I knew I was in a dangerous spot. I had stopped keeping pills in my possession and was afraid to even buy Tylenol for the frequent exhaustion headaches and migraines I got. I was obsessed thinking about the corner store a few blocks away. I could have the pills quite quickly if I wanted. It was hard to be personable toward my roommates/employers because of the way they were treating me.

Eventually, I broke down and called a nurse, explaining that I wasn’t sleeping and was scared I’d try to kill myself again. She calmed me and asked me if I could get to the hospital, and I told her I’d try to go after my next work shift. Both of my clients needed me on the same day, and it was going to be a tricky compromise of working with both of them at the same time so their families could go to whatever thing they had planned. I really wasn’t feeling good, but I hate letting people down, so I did my shifts and then checked myself in.

I was committed, but this time was only papered for a day since I’d voluntarily gotten help without harming myself. This program was even better than the last, and I was able to get help with a diagnoses for PTSD as well as more help with my ADHD and borderline. Basically nothing worked for my insomnia, though, and that’s something that I continue to battle to this day.

And what do you know, after being in the hospital for a week, I came out before I was ready because my ex needed me to take our son (can’t let him down, either). I ended up being fired from my adult respite job, the one for the family I was living with. This was enraging, because I’d delayed my stay at the hospital to help them. But they claimed that the fact that I’d needed to go to the hospital at all had put my client in distress, and so I couldn’t work with him anymore. That shame about my lack of control over my mental health was overwhelming, and I stayed in bed (or, more often, on the floor) for weeks, wasting away and barely able to function.

Eventually, after several more torturous months of living in a toxic pool of hatred, I moved out of there in January and into the SUV my dad had helped me get. I cleaned myself at the gym and continued to work on my business at the library. I went to church almost every day since there was snacks there. Well, I was also a very devout Christian, but I added a few weekly fellowship programs to save on food and dishes.

Now, ever since before I graduated from high school, my parents have been trying to get me to live in dad’s secondary residence. It’s close to Lethbridge, where I was planning on going to school. Throughout the years after I moved to Calgary they would bring this up constantly, saying that I should just go live there and stop paying rent to other people. Of course, when they found out I was living in my car, they brought this up again. After two weeks of sleeping with no heater in the dead of winter in the church parking lot and a polar vortex on the way, I finally decided to consider it.

I moved to this small town to live in a bedroom in a house where my dad already had a renter. And I collapsed again. I don’t think I left the house for two weeks straight, barely even leaving my bed. Not that this was unusual, because I did that practically once a month. But eventually I decided I wanted to get my life back on track and see my son more. He was two hours away in Calgary.

I got a sales job and planned to stay at Airbnb’s while I looked for a place to rent. But that was a disaster. The job was a nightmare. I was rarely allowed breaks while being on my feet all day, often in the cold. I came back to my dad’s rental after less than two weeks and tried to find a job in the town. I also made the decision to end my marketing business, partly because I had a crisis of faith, but partly because I didn’t like the work anymore. I couldn’t figure out how to make the team gel like it used to. I felt guilty and anxious about everything, all the time.

I did end up getting an admin position at the museum here. I can honestly say it’s been one of the best jobs I ever had. It was still challenging in a lot of ways, and I struggled because of my insomnia, PTSD, borderline, ADHD, and other acronyms. Still, I worked harder than ever to be a functional member of society. I went to my nine-to-five even when I wanted to quit. I went out with friends a few times. I started getting serious about my health and went to the gym almost every day, cooked good food at home, and started paying more attention to my budget and my routine.

But I still suffered from aggressive insomnia, no matter how diligent I was. Even when I felt like I was dying inside and wanted to claw my eyes out, I still went to work. I figured out ways to support my mental health during the workday. I created a little sensory station at my desk that included a pinwheel that could help me take deep breaths and a little bundle of tobacco that smells delicious. I’ve started taking productivity breaks on a regular basis so that I can get up from my desk, get some sunshine and fresh air.

Unlike most of my other jobs, now more than half the time I was excited to go to work. I did a variety of things and had a lot of autonomy, and although everyone told me I should have worked at the grocery store or a fast-food restaurant where the pay was better, I was so proud of myself for getting a job that used the bits and pieces of the degree I had tried to get.

At this point, I had been ignoring and avoiding messages and phone calls about the student loans for that degree that I didn’t finish. The whole thing gave me too much anxiety to think about. But of course, this meant that everything ended up in collections. I was resigned to the fact that I’d have to find some grand way to pay it all off if I didn’t want to have it over my head for the rest of my life. I wanted to write a book, become a famous millionaire, and blow my nose in the money. But I continued to make payments that didn’t even cover a portion of my interest, and got my tax benefits garnished. The sum was too great, and there was no way I could pay it off with a minimum wage job.

Eventually, after one of several final notices from the federal student aid collectors, I did psych myself up to at least call them. And they told me something that put me on the crazy path that I’m on now. I was told that I could rehabilitate my federal student loan by making a couple of small payments to get it out of collections and back in good standing. The process was so ridiculously easy I wondered why I hadn’t just picked up the calls in the first place. So, thinking that I could take care of my provincial loans the same way, I called my other collector and asked if they had a rehabilitation program.

The provincial rehabilitation is much more complicated and expensive, however. Essentially, I had to pay off all my interest and then go back to school in order to have my loan reinstated. The interest was almost $4,000. But my federal and provincial loans are almost $75,000 in total, so the price of getting them out of collections seems worth it.

I was tired of my credit being so terrible after working so hard my whole life to keep it perfect. Also, I was rejected from a grant at work that would have given me slightly more pay because I didn’t finish school. I kept seeing job ads where a degree was a non-negotiable requirement, and I realized that if I wanted to have a leg up in life, I really would have to finish my education. It had always slightly bothered me that I had quit, but I had planned to get by on charm and experience. I told myself that a degree doesn’t make much of a difference because everyone has one nowadays, and the market is oversaturated with college grads. I still believe this to an extent, but I’d at least want to get my foot in the door to give my charm and vast experience a chance to shine through.

So, I borrowed more money from my dad, on top of what I’d borrowed for the car that I was still slowly paying him back for. I went to University of Lethbridge, where I had started my post-secondary journey, and met with an advisor. She recognized me from my freshman year eight years ago, which brought tears to my eyes. She helped me get back into school through a slightly convoluted method since it was so late in the year, but I got in. I know I need to be in person at least some of the time, but I also know that my insomnia and other conditions means that committing to physically going to school every single day will give me burnout. I have an unconventional sleeping pattern, and sometimes I need to take naps. I also want to have more flexibility to see my son in Calgary. It’s a long drive, but I’m working hard to find my way and have him back in my life more, no matter what.

As always in the autumn, the darkness came and everything fell apart. Now I also have tuition fees about to go to collections on top of everything. I’m not sure if I can work up the energy to reapply for school for the fourth time. But I know I need to deal with my debts, no matter what.

So, that’s the story for now. Back and forth and up and down and round in circles, but now I feel like I’m on a path that I can stay on, considering everything I’ve learned about myself and what kind of work environment I need. I’m more prepared for the internal and external challenges I know I’m going to face, and I’m prepared to continue to humble myself and take advantage of whatever help I can get. I’ll try not to let my pride get in the way of my progress. I have no idea what the future holds, but I’ve got plans and dreams that I want to work toward. They all involve bringing prosperity to the world through entrepreneurship.

This year has been a crazy whirlwind, but I can honestly say that the four months I’ve worked at the museum, along with finally being more consistent with my physical health and routine, were the turning point in my life. I know I’m going to be dealing with most of these conditions for the rest of my life, but I’m building a life for myself that honours my capabilities, dreams, and limitations.

I want to build a career that is flexible yet steady, where I can have solitude as well as a team, being able to compartmentalize and do a variety of things. I’m in the process of creating a world where I can be more in control of how I manage my mental health.

Like I said, my personal mission in life is to empower people to help each other thrive, and I’m excited for the way that my new path will allow me do that. Thank you for your help with my dream to uplift the world.

If you’d like, get to know me on my blog , where I post my stories and experiences with my conditions. If I can entertain, inspire, or touch one person and make them feel less alone, all of this will have been worth it.