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I'd gotten enough of that in uni.
That was another thing that hadn't exactly been my choice.
It wasn't like I was eschewing an education altogether. I had been raised by people who valued a solid education more than anything in the world. Save for maybe their Welsh Corgi named Nikola Tesla. Because that was a totally normal name for a creature that barked at its own shadow. I understood that, in our society, an education meant the likelihood of a higher salary.
Provided I went into something that paid well. In exchange for that money, I had to give them a little piece of my soul.
I'd tried, too.
I had taken the courses they had urged me to. I went to all my classes. I had completed my assignments, my extra reading, I'd done well on my exams.
I had, by all accounts, made them proud parents.
Until one day, during a particularly bad bout of anxiety at feeling like my life was slowly being pried away from me little by little every single time I stepped into a classroom or a lecture hall, I did it.
I dropped out.
Now, no parents want their kid to quit. It is why they always pull that ridiculous 'if you sign up for something, you finish it' nonsense, thinking it was teaching them to try even when they don't want to. When, in reality, all does is create unhappy, resentful kids who never want to try something new ever again for fear that their parents will make them stick with it even when they are miserable which only creates unhappy adults who stay stuck in dead-end jobs for decades until the blissful, welcome release of death
I was speaking from experience; a full three years of piano lessons and four years of French that I loathed.
Once those were done, I never again pursued my interests. No dance classes, no guitar lessons, no martial arts.
Who knew.
Maybe one of those would have made me happier, would have provided a little passion in my life to offset the pressures of always trying to be the perfect student, making me a frazzled mess who had panic attacks over anything lower than an A.
I had never been a rebellious child, being the only one, I felt oddly responsible for not making their lives any harder than they already were.
But it had come to the point where I just... couldn't take it for another day.
I just needed the pressure off.
I wanted to figure out what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life, not just what would pay my bills until I died.
I had made the mistake of calling my mom after doing it, though.
By the time I decompressed and made it home, my parents were already sitting at the dining room table, something on the surface in front of them, their faces gravely serious.
See, the funny lie the world tells you is this: When you're over eighteen, you can do whatever you want.
Whoever made that claim must have been willing to grab some clear heels, stand on a corner, and get on their knees to make ends meet. Because I didn't know a single nineteen-year-old who was secure enough financially to be able to go off on their own when their parents gave them an ultimatum.
Like go to Armenia to work for your uncle... or find a way to make it in life on your own.
And you have five minutes to make your decision.
My parents weren't hard-handed usually, but they doubled down when something mattered to them.
My education mattered.
So I had two days to pack, uproot my life, and head back to my parents' motherland.
I remembered being there once when I had been ten, barely committing anything to memory except some vague recollections of the food we had eaten, the way Armenian sounded very different when it was coming from dozens of voices instead of just those belonging to my parents who had a tendency to trip in and out of English when they spoke in it.
I had very little idea what to expect.
And my stomach had been in knots when I landed at the airport, standing there waiting for my uncle to show up, to take me home with him.
My mother hadn't been close with her brother. She called him bossy and power-hungry, two things my passive and happy-with-the-small-things-in-life mother could hardly tolerate.
I hadn't been aware that when my parents informed me that he ran a bank that they meant he owned a bank. A big bank. And that when you owned a bank, you had money.
A lot of money.
I had come from the humblest of beginnings. Our house, like most houses in our area, was attached to neighbors on each side with a yard barely big enough to hold anything even akin to the aspired-to English garden. My bedroom was small enough for me to touch both walls when I spread my arms out. Vacations consisted of outings to London which was all of an hour away by car. There weren't new clothes every school year or the newest electronics.
