On my walk home from the grocery store tonight I saw an orange Toyota with a British Columbia license plate. Whenever I see a plate from BC I silently wail, “Why did you come here?!” It’s my dream to escape out to BC and go to school at the University of British Columbia. It has the best writing program in Canada and is where my two most favourite authors honed their skills. If I were to win the lottery the very first thing I would do is apply to UBC.
Erin’s Reason for Not Going to Post-Secondary School #3: Money
Money with a mixture of parental control.
I’d graduated high school with straight A’s and decided to take a year off for my mental health before going on to university. Coincidentally, around that time my parents had told me and my sister that they would be selling the house we grew up in. We moved that summer to a house half the size of our previous house. I moved from a spacious perfected-to-my-tastes bedroom with two windows to a teeny tiny basement bedroom in our new house.
Cue self-harm, cue anorexia, cue suicidality. It was a very bad time in the life of Erin but I still managed to keep my hopes on going to school the next year. My parents convinced me that school in BC was too expensive. They said that they had spent most of the money they’d put away for my education on my mental health treatment, and so I would have to rely on a provincial government loan. I was disappointed but understood.
