"Like Nobody Else" by My Darkest Days

“September 7^th and she’s headed for school. She’ll probably leave me for some college fool, and I know that’s just the way it goes.” While I wasn’t in a romantic relationship during my college days, I still had people who I was away from for five days a week. Port Orchard may be a crappy town, but it still had the one thing I needed most in those days: my family. Mom, Dale, James, Susan, Reina, the animals, they were all a necessary part of my life. When I went to school in Bellingham for five days a week, my access to these people was very minimal. I had nobody in Bellingham who I could go to for help. My roommates moved out because I snored too loudly. The few friends I did have didn’t stick around long enough for a cup of coffee. I didn’t know of any therapists that were in Bellingham nor did I have a way to get to them. So here I was in this strange little town all by myself. Who would want this kind of loneliness and isolation? Isn’t that what prisoners feel every time they get locked up in solitary confinement? And what was it all for? Forced extroversion? A degree employers don’t care about? Hard-to-understand course material? Classmates who ignore me? I often wonder why I would put myself through this torture in the first place and the only answer that seems plausible is that it helped my writing. Actually, my experiences after college were more helpful to my writing than any class I could have taken. After college, I became a born-again bookworm and started reading fast-paced novels (as opposed to the boring literary garbage we were assigned). I also decided that the only critique I would ever accept from my audience was a hybrid of honesty and sensitivity. Constant reading and openness to gentle critique were what saved me as a writer in the end, not college. In fact, I learned more from joining writing groups on Good Reads than I did in those classrooms. Granted, I was highly immature in those old days, but immaturity eventually goes away with age and experience. So what does “Like Nobody Else” by My Darkest Days mean to me? It may have been the song that convinced me to come home if it was released earlier than 2010 (I went to college from 2007 to 2009). Now that I’m home with my family indefinitely, I still feel bouts of loneliness and depression, but these bouts don’t last as long as the ones in college did. I’m never going away again. Ever. If I do go away, there better be something or someone out there waiting for me. I shouldn’t need a high speed sports car to find whatever’s out there. If there does happen to be someone there for me, I still won’t forget where I come from.

　

***DR. SEUSS QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“That Cat’s gonna suffer like never before!”

-The Grinch-