Every once in a while I catch myself thinking about my childhood, and before I know it I’m realizing yet another thing that my family did was rather strange. I know every family is unique, but I never knew just how unique mine was until I got out of my parents house.

First of all, I spent more time riding my bike, gluing pennies to Styrofoam heads, and digging holes to China than your average kid for one simple reason: I was homeschooled (Spell Check wants me to write “home” separate from “school,” but I was definitely homeschooled. We are used to doing things our own way. This includes, but is not limited to, spelling).

I did go to school 2-3 days a week through my elementary years, learning Science, Music, Art, and History away from my parents. On my off-days at home, I was supposed to be doing Math and English on my own or with my mother. I remember learning phonics from “The Writing Road to Reading”, but not much else. I don’t remember reading a book for an assignment (or… maybe at all) until the summer before I began attending a small Christian school full-time in the 8th grade. I never memorized the times tables, but I counted on my fingers all the way through Honors math.

Mostly, we sang, played Cowboys & Indians, made magnificent messes disguised as science experiments, invented our own games, and watched shows about families with 4+ daughters, like us (Little House on the Prairie, Pride & Prejudice, Little Women, etc.). We rode around in my mom’s minivan for hours on end to get to book fairs while other kids were forming lines to go to the bathroom or eating chicken nuggets in a cafeteria.

And sometimes it just hits me how different a childhood in school would have been for me.

However, I didn’t set out to today to share a montage of the happenings of my homeschooled days… my mind is just flooded with little memories I now find either entertaining or embarrassing (usually both). But THIS is what I set out to say:

I’m going back to school.

And by back, I mean back, but I also mean for the first time, because my “college” years were actually an internship. We learned on-the-job, no classrooms. “Harder Better Faster Stronger” describes it to a tee. We had real work to do and real consequences for failures and half-way jobs.

So, although my entire life thus far seems to have been one giant lump of “I follow the rules—in my own way,” I have always, always loved the classroom. Likely because I felt deprived of it my whole life. Deprived of order and specified expectations. Deprived of lines to color in. It’s not in my blood to “color between the lines,” but when a kid gets what a kid wants (lack of order), they grow jealous of the lines in which the rest of the proper world lives.

Thus, I go back to school at 25, while continuing to work full-time.

And I am truly excited about it.

Why? Because I’m going to start learning again, and learning makes Season a very happy kid. Learning is my current missing link to being fulfilled in everyday life. Why were we ever taught that school & learning were for ages 4-22? I never want to stop learning, especially now that I know what that is like. I thought it was “arrival” to stop learning. I was 100% wrong. Learning should never stop. Work should start, but learning should never stop.

Not that you have to be in school to learn. I’m still a kid in that way, I guess… I need a teacher. I also plan on “teaching myself” via personal study and book reading, mentors, lalala… I’m just excited to get better at this thing that I love called writing (oh yeah, I’m looking for a major in something as close to Creative Writing as I can find. Fun, yeah?).

Thanks for the encouragement from some random and, in my opinion, high places! Unlike art, writing is not something I ever thought I was decent at until someone told me. I enjoyed writing as a child, but never took any pride in anything I wrote, save the bits of humor that I took far too much pride in.

So, that’s what’s next for me.

Ok I’ve said too much! Fin!