A Learning Experience
By
Joshua Paul Harke
"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time."
- Thomas Edison
I would like to believe that there is more to life than just suffering and feeling like we are in constant pity. We have to thrive, if we give in to the pain and suffering, we will perish. This is my take on the Thomas Edison quote. I am writing this to share my higher education journey while developing mental health illness.
In 2001 I graduated from high school and I was one of Who’s Who Among American High School Students. I was a great kid; I was voted most school spirit at UFCA my senior year. I played ice hockey, soccer, baseball and I was the mascot in my school. I was very loved according to my yearbooks and senior memoirs.
In my freshman year of 2001 that all changed. I went from a small Christian school to UNCC, which was a culture shock. Thousands of freshmen enter the halls of education at these universities every year. There were 2,351 freshmen entering the fall 2001 semester and I was not just another normal freshman entering that August. I was manifesting bipolar 1 disorder and it had reached full-blown Chernobyl levels of mental illness. I went to class and I would sit in the “T” zone, that’s the middle of the classroom. I was always on time and I hated being late. My favorite memory from freshman year was a public speaking class where I wrote my own eulogy. My favorite line was that I graduated from the George Bush Jr. School of Strategery, that my close friend Chris who helped me write. I was the typical kid, I went to sporting events, pep rallies and parties. I was going to join the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity possibly. I loved it there, I had friends and I was outgoing.
I don’t know when I changed but I became wild, I would stay up for days. It was this new high and I didn’t understand it. I would go to class when I was manic, I had studied and partied as if it was this new superpower. I would go by Josh Spidermen because I would be climbing all over Holshouser Freshmen Highrise. Then I crashed, I crashed so bad into this massive depression. That was my first encounter with bipolar. My parents withdrew me from classes that year and then I went home with them and had been seen by a few doctors. In the spring of 2002, I returned back to UNCC. That was a huge mistake and I lived out the semester on campus again till I had a huge relapse. I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder and my world came crashing down around me. My dad had spent all this money in my first year of college just to be a failure. They really didn’t want me to go to UNCC and I feel like they saw it coming, call it parents’ intuition.
This is not the end of my education. I just had a huge life-changing moment and I would never be the same. I was prescribed Depakote for depression in high school, I believe. The reason I don’t talk much about high school and only gave a precursor was that I have extreme memory loss from taking the drug, Abilify, and trauma. I was put on Lamictal and Abilify in huge amounts by Dr. Ross. Gradually over the years I down dosed substantially and at the end of my time on Abilify, I was on 5 mg. It was years of therapy and lifestyle change. I am now on the drug, Latuda as well as Lamictal still. I struggle with very small things such as consistent showering and other hygiene tasks but as of this day, I have not missed a day of taking a shower in 3 weeks. It’s a huge mental accomplishment because I have trauma reasons for not showering as well as I get distracted easily in the morning and run out of time.
Back to the basics is what I’d like to think of in 2004. I entered Central Piedmont Community College here in Charlotte, NC by taking two classes at the Levine Campus. I was so excited or as I love to say, stoked. I was working with my therapist/ life coach, Michael Khan, at the time. He had the most significant impact on the outcome of who I am today from a therapy perspective. I was given social work assignments that involved school. I was so sad that I had very few friends. I worked hard to study and do my homework as well as work at Sam’s Club. My social work assignments were to have a conversation with one random person a day that I did not know. Remind you that 3 years prior I was a wild child socialite at UNCC. Abilify and some other events in between changed my life. I wasn’t outgoing as much anymore; I was timid and I was not myself. I made a friend in my public speaking class that semester, who was Jonah and we are still friends today. He helped push me to be more social. I wanted the old me back but who was the old me. I’m still young in 2004, I had another opportunity at education. Dr. Ross and Michael Khan had done a great job with me so far as to get me to the point of being able to express myself again.
It took me from 2004-2008 to get enough credits to transfer back to UNCC. I switched programs a few times at CPCC and that didn’t help me at all. There need to be better advisers at these colleges and ones that are familiar with mental health. Later on, the special needs department was helpful. I had quiet testing, extra time on tests and tried having a note-taker. The note taker part wasn’t helpful because I just couldn’t go back and look at their notes and my messed-up notes. I felt like it was frustrating. I transferred to UNCC in 2009 and I was almost a junior. I was doing okay but this wasn’t meant to be, again. I had two bouts of pink eye, mono in the fall and sprained my sternoclavicular joint during the winter break, while I was training to be a mixed martial arts fighter. I was cleared to go back to school and work then I ended up with the flu during the spring semester thus dropping out of the Athletic Trainer program.
I took a year off to heal and work. I worked a bunch of retail jobs as well as working at Carowinds. I decided that I wouldn’t give up. I went back to CPCC in 2011 to get my Associates in Business – Marketing degree. I succeeded and it took me 10 years. I had many failures along the way but in the Fall semester of 2012, I was handed my diploma. It was the most magical day of my adult life. This is what I had been striving for, what I had been working so hard to prove to myself and everyone rooting for me that the underdog can and will win.
I decided to get one more Associates Degree, I wanted to be an adman in 2014. I wanted to write ads but that did not happen due to the interference of working a couple part-time jobs and having needy bosses that would not leave me alone while I was in classes. So, I sidelined my second attempt at a second associate. My need for money superseded my education.
Today is February 10th, 2020 and do you know what I am doing with my life? I can explain that by talking a little bit about 2018 and 2019. My Mom passed away on December 29th, 2018 and I buried her ashes here in Charlotte at the end of 2019 in December. My Mom was the most influential human that existed in my life. Mom and Dad pushed me to be better and not give up on my dream to have a degree and my love of higher education. They also tried to encourage me to take up a trade skill after failing to obtain a degree after so long of being in school. I was persistent, very persistent, I love to learn. My mom was an educator and a director at one time of a preschool in Syracuse, NY called Little Lamb in the church of North Syracuse Baptist. My mom loved kids and I may be adopted but I definitely have her heart for children. I’ve volunteered with inner-city kids and special needs children. I love kids so much that I have decided to be a special education student next fall, in honor of my mother and my little brother, Jasper, that passed away in 2007.
Something in my heart was tugging away at this long-repressed desire to teach since high school where I worked as a teacher aid in a physical education class at UFCA. I loved it and I was really good with elementary kids. So, I answered it, I went to CPCC at the end of the fall semester of 2019 to speak with an advisor instead of going all the way to UNCC to be disappointed by their advisors. Being that I had a lot of credits in my transcript, my advisor told me that I was 2 classes away from an associate in Arts transfer degree. I was stoked, beyond stoked. I had a lot of red tape to jump through to get back into classes and find a way to pay for them. I had to do a lot of modules to even register for classes. I had 5 credit hours that I need to obtain and it looked bleak once again. I could not fund these two classes alone. I went to the financial aid department at school and they were of little help and denied my application for financial aid. I had earned too many credits in my educational career that correlated with financial aid. It was a headache trying to understand all of it. I was so dejected then I found out about this program from NCWorks, a government employment agency, called One-Stop but the grant was the Finish Line grant.
I have this amazing network and group of friends that surround me. I was so stressed out about money because I work in a sports bar, living paycheck to paycheck. I was feeling overwhelmed and bleak about my aspirations that I started to ask my friends to pray for me. Well, Jimmy said, pray, just pray about it and I did. I was walking through the 1st floor at CPCC one day and I spotted that agency at my school. I walked in and filled out an application. I went home and emailed Louis, from the One-Stop program, and asked if they would hold my classes because they would get dropped. Well, they got dropped by the time I had been contacted to come in about my grant opportunity. I was torn and didn’t know what to do, I had to trust in God that this was going to work out. They issued me a grant for $1,000 which paid for tuition, fees, and books. One problem arose, I had no classes, they failed to hold them for me. They quickly had me search for my classes and I had to get a release from the registration office to get enrolled on a hold. After that, I ran to the Giles building to speak with the chair of the bio program there. I convinced her that I would be a Rockstar and she was rightfully hesitant to let me into the class a week late. She allowed me to start the class a week late. I have worked for 3+ hours a day for two weeks to play catch up on 3 weeks of assignments and projects. I would say I succeeded in catching up in two weeks but I paid a heavy toll. I ended up trying to check into the mental health ER here in Charlotte on January 7th. I was so overwhelmed by the work and studying that I broke down. My relationship that I was in tanked at the same time and I wasn’t able to submit the final version of the project. I was just so clearly overwhelmed by the process that it took to go back to school, working full time and the reopening of the wounds of having to revisit the death of my Mother.
You know why this is not a sad thing? I know the best I can get now is a B in that Bio 110 class. I have come to terms with all this sorrow and I know that I have been through way worse. My dad is proud of me for fighting for my dreams to honor my Mother and little brother’s legacies. Just to think that one hiccup almost landed me in a mental hospital but I did not stay. I was super freaked out and walked out on my own because I felt like those other people needed the help more than I. I feel like I have all the tools necessary to carry on. I have a purpose and a passion to start a foundation that will one day help the families of special needs children, across the board from cerebral palsy to autism. I want to work with special needs children while at UNCC in the fall 2020 semester. I have things to work on this summer to get me there but it will happen.
I have been told my whole life I am special, and I aim to succeed in this world and not be a statistic. I would like to leave you with my mantra, “We are mortal men called to do more than mere mortal deeds.”