When I was seventeen I dropped out of school. I was about six months out from my Leaving Cert, which in Ireland is the final set of exams that determine whether or not you’ll get to go to study the course you want to in college. The alternatives are few and far between, and they aren’t signposted. If anything, they feel deliberately hidden. The conventional view on dropping out of secondary school is that you’re throwing your life away. There’s an entire future riding on a set of exams at the end of your final year, and you can quickly start to determine your value to society based on your projected performance.Article continues after advertisement
Never mind that you’re a teenager. That you’re the full spectrum of sad, horny, angry, potentially on drugs, potentially depressed, anxious. That you have no sense of perspective or patience for adult advice, especially when all of the adult advice sounds the exact same.
By my final year of school I was waking up every morning wanting to scream.
This pressure was doubled, I felt, by the crash of 2008. When the bubble burst on a booming trades industry, it looked like a college education was the only way to survive and you should ride out the wave of joblessness by staying in the education system for as long as possible.
