I’m afraid….

I want to be a special education teacher. For my entire high school career, I volunteered with the special ed. department at my school. I loved it.  Through a career progam, I was even able to get three different internships, basically working as a teacher’s aide. I loved working with the students. I don’t even know how to describe the joy it brought me. It is one of the few things that I feel I am truly good at. While I am usually horrible with any sort of human interaction, for some reason, I feel some sort of connection with those students. They always brought a smile to my face, and for some reason, I was always able to bring a smile theirs as well. I decided my freshman year that it was the field I wanted to go in to when I grew up.

College isn’t really what worries me. While I am terrified that it will be as difficult (emotionally) as high school was, I know that I can do well, because I’ve always excelled academically, as long as I was interested in what I was studying.

But I’m scared that I will never be able to do it. What school would ever hire me? Surely they would notice my medical records. The suicide attempts, the general mental instability.

This has been eating at me for quite some time, but I’ve always just pushed it to the back of my mind. What am I going to do? One of the main things that got me through my last attempt was the notion that I would eventually succeed in living my dream. That eventually, I would get the job I wanted, live happily, maybe even settle down with a husband and some kids. But now that dream is crumbling down around me.

I don’t know what to do…

(God, after writing this, I realized how whiny it sounded. I hate that, but I am really just venting my frustrations.)

~Ashley