I used to study law? in Life as I know it...

Today my stepmother went to go visit her 18 year old daughter who just moved out to Stellenbosch to start her environmental sciences (or something like that) studies at the University of Stellenbosch. She just came back home and showed me some pictures they took and I see her smiling, laughing and thriving... It seems like almost a lifetime ago that I entered the student town of Stellenbosch to start my "studies".

I finished school in 2008, with really good marks, but no idea what the hell I wanted to do. The majority of my friends already knew what they wanted to study and do with their lives years ago, but I had no clue what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an archeologist for a while, until my maths tutor laughed and said something along the lines of "What the hell are you going to do with a degree in archaeology?". This made me feel stupid and I decided it probably wasn't a wise idea. I wanted to be one of those guys with the little brush and those little digging tools, carefully removing dirt from Egyptian artifacts or dinosaur bones, but looking back this is more of a childhood dream. So when the time came during the 11th grade when I had to start applying to universities, I had no idea where the hell to apply and for what degree I should apply.

So, I sat in my room and thought "What do people study? What do people do for a living?" and I came up with 1 - Doctor, 2 - Lawyer, 3 - Engineer, 4 - Teacher. I decided to study law, something I have no interest in at all. Let me set the scene first by telling you about the student town that is known as "Stellenbosch"... It is a bubble inside of which the outside world does not exist. Since it is only inhabited by students, it is an assault on the senses. Everybody gets absolutely shitfaced every night, hook up with as many girls or guys as possible, doing drugs, getting into fights, getting arrested, etc. There are the guys who walk around in their muscle-shirts as if they own the world and intimidate everybody else. There are girls who are so full of themselves and are vain, slutty and mean. This place, if you are not prepared, will swallow you down and spit you out as a shell of your former self, which is what happened to me.

The majority of my friends were going to Stellenbosch University. I went together with my best friend, who was quite a quite eccentric drama student. He was good looking, charismatic as hell and drank like a fish. Just before I left for Stellies, my girlfriend at the time broke up with me and I was not taking it well. I was hurting. Anyway, my best friend (Jaco) and I headed off to our new student lives. I had a spot in a student housing complex, which was pretty much just a big block of apartments. When my dad and I went there to go check out and pay for my small apartment, we were under the impression that it was a completely normal block of apartments, except that they were for students and had a few extra perks like pool tables and a swimming pool. When I arrived there, I found out that it was quite different.

Before I dive into this, I have to give a bit of a back story. As a lot of you know, I suffer from severe anxiety and depression and one of events in my life that had the biggest negative impact on me (that I didn't realize until recently when I had to write my life story again) was our 8th grade high school initiation camp. We weren't allowed to look the prefects in the eyes, we had to run laps around the rugby field until we collapsed while big, intimidating guys were hurling verbal abuse your way, sleep on concrete, be woken up every hour and forced to walk around through the mountains while blindfolded, singing school songs and reciting different school motto's. I cried almost the entire time, I was so afraid, I was having panic attack on top of panic attack on top of panic attack and being mocked and shouted at about it. For more information on the "attacks" I experience, see my previous post. This experience left me quite scarred and did a lot of damage to me.

Okay, so I arrived at the student place and fuck me, here we go, exactly the same thing. They had hired a drill sergeant from the army and we were being brutalized. If I had known that this was going to happen, I wouldn't even have considered staying at this place. I locked myself in my room while the old guys were hammering on doors and swearing at us and I phoned my dad and begged him to help me. He came through the following day and spoke to the main guy and we all had a big fight. We got a full refund and a big apology. Okay, so what the fuck do I do now? My dad and I spent the day driving around trying to find me a new place, which we eventually got. It was a 2 bedroom apartment and I moved in with 1 wooden desk, my bed, my clothes and very little else and I just lay there in the empty apartment, crying.

Once the living situation was settled, I tried to get my schedule and my roster sorted out, but the day before class started, my roster hadn't been uploaded onto my student account. So, I went through the weekly times for all of my classes and created my own roster. I was going out every night with Jaco and other high school friends and was getting absolutely blacked out drunk and making a fool out of myself. I became "that guy", the ridiculously drunk guy who made an arse out of himself. I spent the first 2 months attending some classes, but mostly partying at night and being in my bed during the day, extremely hungover, depressed, afraid, lost and suicidal. I stopped taking my medication as well. Then the tutorial classes started and then my classes started clashing with my tutorials, because these weren't my actual classes, because I made my own roster. I tried to sort this out, but gave up. I got a new roommate who would laugh at me, verbally abuse me, use my car as much as he wanted and ended up pretending that the apartment was broken into and stole my ps2 and some other stuff. He never admitted it, but I knew it was him. I looked at all my friends who were having so much fun, laughing, being student and feeling the freedom of being away from home and becoming an adult. On the other hand, I was so depressed, drinking like a fish, losing all my friends, suicidal, crying, afraid, anxious and losing hope. This continued until I got blacked out drunk one night only to regain consciousness in the holding cells of Stellenbosch Police Department, not knowing what I had done and how I got there. I was let out the following morning with a fine for "Riotous Behavior". I didn't bother asking for details. I phoned my dad, told him what happened, told him how I was feeling and that I needed to get out of this place.

My dad stayed out in the country at this point, he always hated staying in the overpopulated, traffic-ridden city. I decided to go to his place for a while to just calm down, relax and regain my composure. I stopped drinking (I hated drinking anyway, it made me feel terrible as my liver was very weak because of all my medication) and I slept, played with my stepmom's dog and trying to forget everything. At this time, my brother was doing his 2nd stint in rehab at a center really close by, and he would come visit often, because he had been there a while and because the counselors knew he was with my dad, they were okay with it. I would hear his lighter clicking all night while he was smoking meth. He would steal my dad's money and disappear. This was the worst relapse he had at that point. It led to him prostituting himself, sleeping on the streets in a meth-induced psychosis and pretty much just a lighter version of the previous entry I wrote regarding my "disgusting brother" in the title, I don't want to rehash everything.

This was by far the worst year in my life and I still think back at it and feel horrible. All my friends were still studying there, but I wanted to go nowhere near that place, so of course, I lost contact. I was so depressed, terrified, anxious, scared, embarrassed, jealous, disappointed and feeling inadequate and pathetic. That was my experience with the University of Stellenbosch. Seeing the photos that my stepmom and her daughter took and how happy she looked and how she looked like she was having the time of her life made me think back to that dark period in my life.

Phew, I'm exhausted now. I hope I was able to describe everything that happened as good as possible. Didn't feel like going into too much detail about my brother as I already said everything that I had to say about that disaster in the previous entry regarding him. Thank you for reading.

Have a good day Adriaan