I went to the professor’s office hours — something I’d never done before and have done consistently ever since — and told him I was having trouble keeping up. He was a small man with very direct eye contact, and he said, “What do you want to do?”
I said I didn’t know.
He said, “You can withdraw without academic penalty until the fifteenth. That gives you a week.”
I withdrew. I retook the class the following spring and got a B-plus.
That withdrawal cost me a semester. Which is how the six-year timeline works: not because I was slow or unfocused, but because I made one sensible choice under pressure and it pushed everything back by four months.
I didn’t tell my parents about the withdrawal until it was already done. When I did tell them, my mother said she was sorry it was so hard. She said I was doing so well.
My father said he hoped I wasn’t taking on too much.
Ethan, when I mentioned it at Christmas, said he’d had a hard semester too. He said his program was really demanding. He said design school was more intense than people expected.
I said I believed him.
I did believe him. That’s the thing. Ethan’s difficulty was real. I just also had difficulty, which was less often mentioned.
By my third year at Meadowfield I had a routine that worked. I had Sophie, who had also found a routine that worked. I had Ms. Delgado, who had secured me a total of six thousand dollars in grants across two years and was optimistic about the next round. I had a supervisor at the billing office who let me adjust my hours around exams if I gave two weeks’ notice.