Danielle-ing into the void

When I decided to… lol, essentially pay out of pocket to go to college for a second time in my 40s, I knew it was going to be a brutal, miserable road. The few people in my life (who did this themselves) told me so. One person just gave me a hug out of sheer pity. "There will be a lot of tears," was one phrase from another friend that sticks in my head. They were correct!

Right now, I spend the vast majority of my waking minutes working or studying. In case you don't know me super well, I'll run down the cool stats, which sound, honestly, fake. Who the fuck would do this?

I work full time, plus I have a part time teaching job (that I love, to be clear!), a very part time thing working on a game (an unfunded, unannounced indie, just like 99% of my friends in the wonderful, definitely-not-on-fire game industry!), a part time job volunteering on an ambulance (I'm hitting ten years of service in May 2026!) and I also take multiple science classes, almost always a lab science (so, a full lecture section and full lab section) plus another lecture on top of that. Call it 2.5 science classes at once, upper level biology and chemistry (with a bit of math thrown in for flavor).

I also do have a family, a partner, pets, and the usual middle class human responsibilities. There are parts of all of this that are wonderful, but it is all far much too much, and my average mood ranges from "frazzled but functioning" to "gee, I sure wish I could sleep for about three months straight" to much, darker and sadder things that I won't post publicly.

Sloshing around in the background of my brain, I've got (actual, diagnosed) obsessive compulsive disorder, panic/general anxiety disorder, and major depression. I'm also (somehow) continuing to train in my sport, though I am absolutely not competing anytime soon, given all the chaos of my schedule. Maybe you could say I'm playing with a full deck!

Also, here's an acknowledgment: nothing is good for ANYONE in 2026 (if you are not a billionaire or a white nationalist). So I do take it all with a grain of salt (we are all suffering) and I very much want to be the kind of person who helps others, in many contexts in life, and does not cause further pain.

I have always loved being busy, especially when my activities are fulfilling and energizing. Once upon a time in my life, they mostly were, and I was just the luckiest little Brooklyn queer running around the borough! But things have changed, and here we are, and I am making the best I can of the situation.

Regarding my schooling, I expected it to be pretty brutal. What I did not expect was for nearly every single class I take to be a hot, hot mess. I can count on one hand the number of times I recall test questions having only obviously false answers (from back in college or grad school, this would be 2002-2006 and 2006-2009 for me). Or the times a question on the test was never in any material in the class—not in any lecture, not in the textbook, nowhere. This happens on a DAILY basis in some of the classes I'm taking.

Even the very best and most organized classes I've been in have had this at least a few times. Questions that are either so typo-ed to hell you genuinely can't make sense of what it's asking, or where absolutely no answer makes any logical sense, or where the correct answer appears twice… but lol, only one of those instances is counted "correctly" by whatever grading software they use.

My partner and I have a joke about whether the answer to something is "nucleotides" or "nucleotides." Surely, it's "nucleotides" but which one? Answer A or B? Who could fucking say!

I recently studied my entire butt off for a quiz that I was told would be on, and I quote, "the endocrine system and blood vessels." I confirmed with my professor before leaving class that those were the main subjects of the quiz. I studied, I got to the quiz, and yes, the endocrine system was on there. You know what else was? The digestive system! (We have not gotten to the digestive system yet. It's not even next in the order we are supposedly going in, according to the syllabus). And yet, here we are.

Now, I will give credit where it's due… MOST (not all, but most) of my professors have corrected the most egregious stuff and given points back on tests, etc. But that only happens if a student brings it up to them, and many people (in my experience, most of my fellow students) are too afraid or uncomfortable to do so. I don't blame them, I fucking hate having to do it myself. But it's that or lose points after points after points because… either the test is from some fucking weird source from 40 years ago, or the teacher wrote it with chatGPT or, truly, I don't know what else, dude. I really don't.

Some of my professors treat legitimate questions I have as an awesome joke, one even answered a question I posed (before class and on a resource he purported was a study guide he made for us) with a "I hope you find out before the exam tonight."

Great! And very cool!

Here's the thing: I know how hard it is to be a college teacher. Especially a part time lecturer—I am one. I've been teaching college courses, as a lecturer, since 2009. I teach every quarter. It can be challenging, and I know that it can be annoying and frustrating too! We are all fighting so many things (not least of which is AI, rotting the very neurons out of students' brains like little maggots falling to the ground in piles). It's bad out there, and it's hard.

But, for the love of all that is fucking holy, I wish I could just study some material and be tested on it in a sane, normal way. I just want to succeed and learn and bring this knowledge forward with me. I'm not trying to be sour grapes, I'm doing very well in most of my classes, but it's already so exhausting, I wish there wasn't an extra layer of insanity on top of something that's already hard enough.

I'm doing well enough that some of my professors have told other students to contact me and study with me, so I try to help everyone out. I share my own study materials and tell people how I do things if they do ask. I share all the resources I use personally. I'm just trying to help in a shitty situation.

And just to be clear, I did not go to some great institution of higher learning when I got my bachelor's degree. You might recall, I fully failed out of algebra 2 and physics my junior year of high school, so I went to a "fine" and "ok" four year college for my BA. So, I'm not comparing my current experiences to fucking Brown University or Oxford or something.

I am also currently going to legit, accredited senior colleges for these classes. So take that for whatever that's worth too.

I still love learning about biology and medicine (chemistry can kiss my entire ass, though I've gotten a lot better at it over the last year), I still feel confident that I am learning A LOT. But I wish very much it wasn't this painful in this plainly unnecessary way. I expected (and still expect) every single step to be difficult, but this is just such a mess.

It's been just about a year now since I decided, in my forties, to go back to school to take science classes. It's been a truly wild experience: sometimes awful, sometimes wonderful, always stressful, but I can only hope it'll be worth it overall.

For reference, I graduated college with my BA in 2006, and finished my MA in 2009. But I'm going back… for science! So, right now in my life, I work full-time, I teach part time, I volunteer on an ambulance, and I take science classes. Lots of biology (yay!) way, way more chemistry (yay!/boo!, its both, always both) than I ever imagined I'd take in my wildest dreams. It's completely insane, and yet, it's where I am right now.

And a fun warning: I'm going to talk about grades here! I'll also touch on mental health and assorted sundries.

Let me tell you what it's like to shit yourself over grades in your 40s. In a nutshell: it's insane, and pretty terrible. Imagine all your nightmares about failing a class are real, but also, you need to do your job all day first. Also, you have BILLS and RENT and you have 1/10 the energy you did when you went to school the first time! You also -- if you are very, VERY lucky (as I am), have a partner who loves and supports you, and the specter of disappointing them and working too hard to have a social life buzzes about you at all times.

My first class, starting last January, was precalculus at a CUNY, and it was the worst academic experience of my life by far and away. The professor was pretty hostile, and every exam had an oral exam component, which was panic-inducing (you might imagine, if you have, uh, MATH TRAUMA and a raging anxiety disorder). I'm 90% sure she didn't even grade most of my work, she just gave me a C based on vibes and vibes alone (most of the tests I did get any kind of grade for were Bs and even an A or two), and when I tried to argue my performance was perhaps worth higher (politely and rationally), she told me I would've gotten an A based on effort (lol, I went to office hours every single week, completed every homework, completed every single extra credit assignment), but had "bad recall" and got so nervous in the final oral exam I couldn't adequately explain a simple trigonometry concept. The department didn't give a shit about my concerns, and the C stood. It remains the only C I've ever gotten in college!

(Cool fun fact: some of the math trauma comes from failing algebra 2 and physics the same year in high school, where I had a teacher who enjoyed making fun of me, parading failing grades in front of the class for all to laugh at. Catholic school in the late 90s/early 2000s was a trip!)

Just after that, I took a hyper-accelerated general chemistry 1 (lecture + lab) class. It was my first science class since… 2004? I worked my entire butt off for a B. I saw chemistry equations in my sleep, pretty much nonstop. I was happy with the B!

Then I took a medical terminology class (A), a survey of chemistry class (A) to beef up my chem game before general chemistry 2, and Anatomy and Physiology 1 (A in lab, and my grade in lecture is still pending, because, wouldn't you know it, my professor messed up my grade. I hope he changes it!)

I'm currently taking general chemistry 2, and about to dive into anatomy and physiology 2 (lecture + lab). I'm at a place now, a year in, where I prep especially hard for certain classes, and do some kind of prep for almost everything. For example, I worked through every traditionally difficult chapter of my gen chem 2 book ahead of starting the class, so I'd have foundations to build on (and hopefully make the most obvious math mistakes first, so I'd get things right when it counts). I started prepping for organic chemistry last summer, and hope to have a few weeks of focus on that well before I take the class in earnest, since it tends to be a dream-crusher!

Why am I doing this? Why am I subjecting myself to what feels (honestly, at times) like a form of torture? Well, I want to be much, MUCH more effective for my patients. I've been an EMT for just under ten years now (it'll be ten years in March, and ten years in May of active service + consistent volunteering), and I've always wanted to know much more pharmacology, anatomy and physiology, pathophysiology, etc. I feel like a surface-level provider sometimes, I want more and to help more. Maybe I'll be able to go for further training one day. We'll see.

Another factor that led to my whole paying-out-of-pocket-to-go-to-undergrad-again: things are so dark in our country right now, and secondarily, the game industry and entire media apparatus are doing… poorly. There were times in the last couple of years (before Danielle's college 2.0 plan) I was so catatonically depressed that I would just sit on the floor, staring at the wall.

At least if I'm doing 20+ step acid-base titration problems, I'm not in that place.

There have also been parts of this process that are fantastic. It's confirmed a couple of things for me: I should've been taking science classes my whole life, and hey, I'm actually not stupid! Can You imagine? That with the right tools and motivation, I could teach myself a lot of the basics, prepare for difficult classes, and do really well? I've gotten 100s on quizzes and exams in the last couple of months, in tough classes that I was convinced I was way, WAY too stupid to ever take. I just got a 100 on a chemical kinetics quiz, the math and conceptual underpinnings of which I would've noped away from with prejudice at pretty much any other time in my life.

This feels good at a time when I've been… well, to be completely honest, eroding. In the last few years, I've felt smaller and somehow less than with each passing month. Sometimes the acceleration has felt faster than that, and other times, I had bright spots where I felt more like myself.

I say all of this knowing I am a very lucky person, and have a good life. I'm lucky to be so high functioning, despite the rotting lava percolating in my skull at all times. But the depression was well and truly kicking my ass, for a very, very long time. Ever since Fanbyte fell apart, really.

There's also this: some of my experiences have seriously cemented how I approach teaching my own students. I really value treating my students well, and giving them, frankly, a goddamn break if they are having a hard time. After some of the shit that I have seen (and had happen), I'm doubly committed to that. I even (finally!) made fresh trello board for teaching and organizing my lectures and improving them.

I've been writing some form of this in my head for the last few weeks. It's funny, I used to be someone who a small subset of other human beings used to read and listen to on the internet. I used to be on three podcasts a week, talking about media (mostly games! but also: movies, sports, and some ephemera about my life: snippets of grappling and my time on my ambulance, etc.). On Idle Thumbs, Waypoint, and Fanbyte, I had all kinds of avenues to talk about things I loved (and hated, and had… complex feelings on).

It's been odd to be in my current life, post-that-era. Its been odder still to survive the shittiest, crappiest, bleakest year of my goddamn life (at least, ha, most of it, it still has a couple weeks, I guess!) and sit here and want to write about it. But here we are! I'm just going to go for it.

First things first: I am a lucky gal and my life is pretty awesome, and also: the entire fabric of the country has been unraveling in increasingly stupid and hellish ways, and that's the soup all of us are in, all day, every day. The hyper-normalization of things like: our neighbors getting ripped off the streets for not looking "the right way" to a racist in a mask and vest. The fact that USAID was blown out of the water (I don't know how many people died from that, maybe the tally hasn't been counted) because another insane racist (this one a billionaire) got the keys to a government department and a chainsaw. Also, a genocide.

And closer to home: the game industry is on five-alarm fire, AI slop is breaking people's entire brains (and the economy! No, not you too, Mickey Mouse!), media, as a healthy career is about as viable as rancid dogshit, and perhaps the closest to home: my obsessive compulsive disorder has RUDELY decided to stay firmly lodged in my brain, and now it's extra terrifying to even think of setting foot in an airport.

To be clear: some of the why and how of just how bad this year has felt has been the "other shoe dropping" of it all. The near misses with deaths, the scrapes with "is this normal? Is this ok? Have I lost my mind?" that bode so poorly for a sunnier future. It's been this bad because the bad things have been numerous, yes, but because it feels like it's really just the beginning of much, much worse.

The bad things were personal this year, they hit me in places I'm vulnerable. I'm not going to go into too much gory detail, but it all started with a mass layoff that left me feeling so destabilized that, laugh at me if you want to, I think it broke something in my little brain, y'all. I tried to have them take me instead of the other team member. It didn't work.

Then I found out my mom had cancer, and then, very soon after, another beloved family member had a really scary brush with death. This is not about me, I promise, but I spent my birthday and subsequently the rest of February and March in the hospital, fucking praying that I wouldn't lose someone I cared about.

I was very honestly telling people "this is the worst year of my life" about forty five days into the year.

This was also the year I decided, at 41 years of age… I'd go back to school and study science. I graduated college in 2006, and got my master's degree in 2009, but now, here I am, graying and gaying it up as a wee baby undergrad science student.

At the moment, I work full time, part time (teaching! I've been teaching at the same college for ten years, in fact!), I volunteer on an ambulance, and I study biology and chemistry.

It's both god-awful and fantastic: I actually love learning, and I love science. I always have, and thought I was far too stupid to do it, and it's been nice to prove my younger self wrong. I did have the worst academic experience of my entire life on starting this journey (a precalculus class where every exam was an oral exam and I don't believe the professor once graded any of my other work!). I did a lot of precalculus in my mom's hospital bed. In various hospital lounges. That professor, and that class, were a nightmare (and precipitated a lot of real-life nightmares!)

After that: I got a B in a hyper-accelerated general chemistry class, an A in a medical terminology class, an A in a subsequent chemistry class, and I'm currently finishing up an anatomy and physiology class where, if nothing else, I've gotten slick 100s on two exams. I'm starting general chemistry 2 next week, organic chem after that, anatomy and physiology 2 after that. I'm COOKING.

I'm still grappling, though, not nearly as much as I'd like. If I get there once or twice a week, I consider it a minor miracle and a gift from whatever deity is taking kindly to overworked students that day. I'm working on a game project with an incredible team that has heated up and I am vibrating with excitement for it despite the fact that time to work on it is also a rare gift. I'm still drawing and learning art, though those need to be in little clusters now.

I have so little time to think or breathe or process, and my mood flips on a dime: how well I did on a quiz or exam will make or break me until I pick my little ass up and study another 12 hours for the next thing. The worst part, by far, of being a student is how beholden you are to the random machinations of a school or a professor (and sometimes, terrible, outdated, or even plain incorrect curriculum). I can't tell you how many tests I've taken where the correct answer to something doesn't appear as an option (something that, hand to heart, I only recall happening once or twice in my original four years of getting my bachelor's).

Lol, also, a lot of students super duper do cheat and use AI, and yes, it does drive me insane.

One thing that is wild at the moment is being a student and a lecturer at the same time, in such wildly different subjects. I will often have a day where I do grading and a lecture for my students… then I walk to school and hand in my little homework problems and take my little exams and freak out about my own grades. It is truly humbling (and gut-wrenching at times). I know with complete certainty how I want to treat my students, and holy tapdancing fuck, it's been an eye-opener (and you know what? Really validating. I'm proud of how I've treated my students and will continue to do so.)

I can honestly say I've been battling a few personal demons this year (if only they were hotter), and get my ass kicked more often than not. I can also honestly say that, despite how destabilized and anxious and sometimes-possibly-not-entirely-human I feel, I do feel somewhat less depressed than I did for most of the last three years or so.

Part of that has to do with the fact that doing insane 20+ step chemistry problems and memorizing thousands of pages of biology information is actually a really nice distraction from feeling hopeless. There's something to that! Not that I'd recommend this exact thing to anyone else.

So, yeah, I want 2026 to be better, the same way that I would love to devour a giant peppermint stick and hot fudge sundae right now… but I need to go study for a final.

If I pat myself on the back for anything in my stupid life, it's for having some measure of resilience and grit. I think it's probably the only thing that kept me on my feet, and undoubtedly what I'll draw from when things inevitably get worse.