I dropped out of college. Let me say that plainly, the way it deserves to be said. Not softened, not explained away before it has a chance to breathe. I dropped out. I walked away from the idea of a degree and carried the weight of that decision in ways I could not always name. There were years between who I was then and who I would have to become to walk back through those doors. Years of building, of practicing, of learning things in the world that no classroom had yet asked me to master. Years of showing up for communities, for causes, for other people's dreams, while quietly setting my own aside and telling myself it was fine. That I had made peace with it. That the degree did not define me, so the absence of it should not either.

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