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I got the call from my father’s friend at eight in the morning—the morning after Halloween: “Young, I have bad news. Your father passed away last night.” I softly whispered “no.” I felt numb. After a brief conversation going over funeral arrangements, I went back to sleep. I wouldn’t awaken for many years. Those years were punctuated with horrible nightmares of my destructiveness as well as deep longings for my warrior scholar; my inspiration; the dear friend and mentor I had built my aspirations upon: my beloved father. My father was so proud of me when I was accepted to Columbia. Since I was a child, he had done his best to instill within me the importance of education and the idea that the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake was the noblest of all pursuits. He hoped that I would someday become a professor. However, without my father’s forceful presence, my resolve—along with the roadmap to my career to academic excellence—evaporated into confusion and hopelessness. With my father’s death, my scholarly dreams wavered. I, the aspiring cum laude student, became a ghost wandering the halls of Butler library—unable to hack it through even a single semester without dropping all his classes. Without my parents, I could not support myself. Without reasonable progress towards my degree, neither could Columbia. Education and the search for knowledge is what inspires me–yet, at this dark point in my life, I had utterly failed. My dismissal from Columbia came as just a formality that simply brought an official end to my career as a student. It came as almost a merciful release from the meandering, seemingly hopeless chase my education, and indeed, my entire life had become. I ran away: ran away from New York, my friends, responsibility, and my dreams. Everything was dashed—completely hopeless and bleak. I abandoned it all running into what, I didn’t know or care. Desperate, I turned to the military to help me find direction. Shortly after arriving back in my old stomping grounds in Southern California, I enlisted with the Marine Corps. In retrospect, I think in many ways, I was trying to find someone or something to replace my father. I didn’t want to think about how painful my life was and what I would have to do to fix things: I just needed someone to tell me how to feel and what to do. Considering the Corps’ reputation as scarcely human warriors who value muscle over brain, I suppose it was an odd choice for an aspiring academic, but I didn’t join to think. I wanted to forget it all. Just leave the pain and disappointment behind and go some where my face and name were unrecognizable. Life was definitely tough in basic training but in a strange way, amongst the demanding physical training and being yelled at by drill instructors, stark moments of peace found me. My days were spent marching, practicing rifle maneuvers, and constantly running. The mind-numbingly rigid schedule gave me a long time to reflect. I thought long and hard about my parents passing; about how everything was changing so quickly; and about what it all meant to me. Countless questions arose with few answers; but something about all these reflective reveries forced me to think about my past in a length and manner I had avoided in the past. Previously, all these events were nothing more but concrete facts tainted with only whispers of painful emotions. Now, I had to abstract these emotions and truly figure out what purpose they would serve me in my life. What was my choice? I could continue to make excuses about my life and how I was short-shrifted at every turn—always unable to mete my true potential; or I could internalize it and move on. I realized how badly I wanted to pause life for a moment to just take a breath. As I was about to find out, life never gives you that opportunity. In the middle of training, I was diagnosed with severe stress fractures in both my tibia that required reassignment to a Medical Rehabilitation Platoon (MRP). The doctors gave me a choice: I go home with an honorable medical discharge, or, I could prolong training indefinitely until I got better. I chose the later. After coming this far, there was no way in hell I was going to fail. I worked out nearly four hours a day. Unfortunately, my career in the military was not to be. While the soft-tissue of my body was increasing in strength and endurance, the scaffolding underneath was slowly weakening under the pressure and would sooner or later crack and leave me disabled. The Navy doctors had no choice but to medically discharge me. My career as a marine was at an end.

That night, I remember going into a bathroom stall to cry. It was the choking type of cry one normally has as a child throwing a tantrum. I gasped for air as the tears streamed down my face frustrated by the fact that I had failed in yet another one of life’s tests. I left the base a week later and went back home. Alone again—burdened with uncertainty. I was left with the choice again: wallow in despair and fade away; or get back up. There was a realization that profoundly altered my understanding of my situation. Although ultimately I did not complete my training; this was a result of a failure of my body, not my mind. I had pushed as hard as far as I could go—it was my body that had failed. For the first time in my life, I had willed my mind to go as far as it could go. This was a unique situation for me. I was born gifted with many talents so I think I always took for granted the things that came easily to me. Unfortunately, this fostered within me a weak constitution that lacked the will to see things through to the end. I had skill but lacked mental fortitude. For the first time, I had pushed my mind as far and as long as it could go—it was my body that failed. In a sense, I felt robbed, but the more significant event was that I had pushed to the breaking point. This is something I had never done before. There has been a great sense of satisfaction with the lessons I learned from the military. I was surprised with the strength I discovered in myself. I always had a sense that I never pushed myself as hard as I should—always falling back on my gifts but never challenging them; pushing them; seeing how far I could go. The next couple years have been spent reading thousands of pages of computer science books and earning IT certifications. After a couple years in as an IT professional and several promotions which brought me to Portland, I sometimes still look back in amazement at how far I’ve come. Despite the success I’ve found in my professional life, my father’s inspiration and dreams call me as strong as when he was alive. Borne from his hopes and dreams for his American raised son, these dreams have now finally become my own. The realization of this higher education is not only something taught to me by mentor anymore, it is something I want and desire deeply as my own. This tirelessness—the relentless pursuit of knowledge and education—now backed by my own relentless desire to push myself, to constantly question my constitution, and to ultimately find new limits to where I can go drive me to finish what I started so many years ago at Columbia. The dream would become my dream not fueled by my father’s forceful presence, but by my own will. A resolve borne from something I had not known before: my ability to push my mind as far as I could go