My Story Part 2 - the College Years

As I was transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, I pretty much made every money mistake there is to make. I took out high-interest student loans, smoked a bunch of marijuana, drank alcohol, played poker, did hard drugs, spent money eating out, and even lent large sums of money to people who would never pay me back.

My first mistake during these years was starting to smoke pot. If I could tally how much money I've blown on marijuana during my life, it'd probably be close to $10000 or so. It's sad, really. What started off being an innocent habit at an 8th a week ($50) quickly spiraled into double, triple, and even quadruple that. Combine that with the fact I was losing around $50-100 a week or so on poker, and you've got a person who pretty much spent all his money on things he couldn't really afford.

Since I was stoned all the time and truly aimless at life, I dropped out of my second year of community college. I told myself I needed some time to decide where I wanted to transfer, but really I just wanted to smoke all the time. If I had finished that year of college, I could have had an additional 24 or so credits that I wouldn't have had to pay for when I went to Montreal for University. Instead, what ended up being an innocent time of "trying to find myself" turned what really amounts to an $18000 student loan debt.

When I did actually transfer schools to Montreal, all I wanted to do was continue smoking pot all the time. I barely did any of my homework, and I never really accomplished any of the personal goals I wanted to since I was high all the time. Not only did it affect my financial life, it also affected my personal life. I had no social life whatsoever. So basically I traded both positive experiences and financial gain for self-destruction and personal angst.

I told myself that this was simply the life of a writer, but really that was just BS. I had the ability to make myself happy, and all the tools around me to do so, but I chose to pick the self-destructive route.

These days I'm trying my hardest to make the most of my time and my energy, and I suppose it's good that I made all those mistakes earlier in my life, because I have fuel to make up lost time and to try and live my life to the fullest.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully I'll have more to share down the line (positive stories, I hope).