Tabitha Shearin

Memorable Moment
Rhoda Lukens
09/24/2014
Two Roads
Nothing sums up the last four years of my life quite like Robert Frost in his poem, The
Road Not Taken. As I crossed the stage and turned my tassel it was as if two paths unfolded,
like a red carpet, at the end of the stairs. I had to choose before I could walk off stage. One
looked nice and simple; easy. The other looked difficult to traverse but I couldnt know for sure
because it wasnt all laid out in front of me. Flashing forward, I remember my first day of
freshman year at UNCC like it was yesterday. The uncontrollable excitement pulsed through
every nerve ending like a stampede of wild stallions. Every step felt like a sprint and every
breath filled me like a hot air balloon. I was sailing on cloud nine and no one could bring me
down. I had accomplished something no one in my family had even dreamt of. I dropped the
shackles of my home town like so many of my friends, to this day, have failed to do. I had done
it, I wasnt sure what it was yet but, I was going to soak in the glory of my first day in college
even if it killed me. I thought I had chosen the easy path, little did I know around the bend was a
thicket; a thicket that, in hindsight, was filled with my own failures.

My time in high school can be summed up in two words, strong breeze. I could have
never gone to class and still passed all of my exams; it was like that breeze allowed for smooth
sailing. There was never a real challenge with the courses. I had a teacher tell me once that she,
wasnt allowed to give grades below a C, so what did I care anyway? My graduating class stood

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three hundred and fifty students deep at Freshman Orientation. By the time we turned our tassels,
two hundred of us stood bloodied and battered from the joys of four years in high school. My
school had the highest dropout rate in our county for the entire four years I attended, and
probably still does. Many of the classmates in my sophomore and junior classes were 19, 20,
and even 21 years old. There was no real concern or attention paid to students unless they were
causing a problem. One fourth of the students I walked across stage with couldnt read or write a
simple sentence. It was the schools task, and obligation from years or failures, to pass and
graduate as many students as possible. This was the standard set before us generations previous,
as far back to when my parents were of school age and were needed more at home on the farm.
To be considered a success by the teachers and community, you just had to make it to graduation
without a ring or a baby. Not only had I graduated high school, which neither of my parents
accomplished, I was also not engaged or pregnant.

My dad was a disabled Vietnam Veteran, who finished the eighth grade, and my mother
had been a hairdresser, only finishing tenth grade. My mother was from the same town I lived in
but my father came there for work many, many years before me. They struggled to have children
of their own so they decided to give back and take on the honorable burden of becoming foster
parents. I was one out of eighty nine kids they took in, and only one of two they kept. I was
adopted at sixteen. The culmination of my dad being a disabled veteran and benefits rewarded to
me for being adopted after the age of 13; my college experience was paid for. But before I could
seek refuge in my already paid for education; I had to finish being an eighteen year old who was
working sixty hours a week, scraping to keep my mom on top of bills and making sure that
everything was taken care of at home. I, unfortunately, had been playing Head of the
Household for quite a while: working full time, attending school every day, keeping the house
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clean, caring for the dogs, and helping my mom maintenance the cars . I wanted nothing more
than to get away, have a break, and try to become a kid again. College was my ticket to freedom
and I wanted to ride it as far away from North Carolina as possible. I found out three weeks
before classes began that in order for my financial aid benefits to cover my schooling, I was
going to have to stay in North Carolina to attend college. There was no way I could have
afforded to go to school anywhere else. We were very poor, and we were struggling. I yearned to
become a doctor at Brown University; an Ivy League school, far enough away from home, and
with the program I desired. I had attended a Leadership Conference in Boston, allowing me to
tour Brown University, at the nomination of my Allied Health teacher in high school. I was
astounded and mystified by the campus and all the opportunity I knew it could bring me. I
remember sitting in the VA office after hearing Brown was not even an option, and crying; I was
devastated and nothing was going to change that. I never came to terms with the shackles that I
felt engulfed my spirit. UNC Charlotte, the only school in North Carolina that I applied to, was
going to have to be my one way ticket out.

High school was such a breeze that I was convinced college would be no different. My
first day of class was like something off of the sci-fi channel. It was abstract, out of place, and
something I was clearly not really ready for. My class schedule was the product of over
confidence and horrendous advising. My schedule was stacked with sixteen, ambitious, credit
hours. I went to the first week of classes, foreseeing myself in classes most of the day, followed
by studying, labs, and, if I was lucky, some form of recreation. I realized quickly that my
schedule was impractical and I was not invested in my education at UNCC enough to take the
tremendous amount of stress and hardship that was approaching. Blessed with hind sight it was
in this moment, like Frost, I had stumbled upon my paths in the forest. On my left stood the path
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to personal success; graduating college with a degree. On my right was the path to failure, no
diploma but a strong social circle. The concept of adding and dropping, or withdrawing from a
class was to admit I had failed. To admit that maybe I wasnt as big of a success as I perceived
myself to be. I needed to be successful to prove my self-worth.

Rugby saved and destroyed me all in the same moment. For a while, rugby relieved my
mind from the pressures of school and the rising disputes between my mother and me. Our
relationship was growing more and more strained after financial issues with both my financial
aid and my mothers income. These financial burdens hindered our ability to communication
and, eventually, we stopped speaking. Rugby gave me an outlet for my aggression and a support
system separate from family. On the other hand, I had come to college with a drinking problem
that my teammates not only condoned, but almost encouraged. The atmosphere was free and the
people were open, I could be myself and remove my thoughts from what really mattered: school.
I continued drinking heavily throughout my freshman year and after the first semester, I had
managed to maintain a 0.33 GPA, needless to say, I was put on academic probation. Despite
being unhappy with being at UNCC and continuing the battle with my family, I made it through
my second semester with a final GPA of 1.5. I was kicked out of school. Nothing was more
degrading than knowing I would not go to school, I would not play rugby, and I would not have
a way to support myself now that my adopted mother and I had lost all communication. Despite
my circumstances, I worked through the summers as a manager of a local gym and paid for
summer courses out of pocket at UNCC. It wasnt until three summer sessions in that the Dean
of my program pulled me aside after denying all of my appeals, to tell me I should figure out if
college is the road Im supposed to take. After that, she informed me that my summer courses
were actually starting my two-year rule clock completely over. That my best option was to come
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back with an Associates degree or take two full years off. With the help and constant motivation
from my biological mother; I was able to come to terms with my failures, realizing that I would
have to live with the repercussions of my decision to mess around in school.

For the past two years, I have worked harder than I ever thought I was capable of. With
encouragement, and with my future goals and plans fairly set, I was ready to reenroll at UNCC
and fix what I had destroyed two years prior. It took taking the wrong path, the one I so often
tend to stray to, to teach me what the meaning of success and passion is. My misfortune gave me
the chance to seek out my calling and create a plan for my future that is concrete and thorough,
rather than what I put together when I was 18 and still in high school. I am back at UNCC full
time, and have changed my major from Athletic Training to Undecided. This fall I am applying
for the 2015-2016 school year at Appalachian State University to study Sustainable
Development. I am more excited and determined to succeed in school than ever before; but I will
never forget what it took for me to get here. [So] I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere
ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, and
that has made all the difference.

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