I think of this program and this degree as the culmination of my studies and my efforts in education, and by recognizing this, I need to also recognize the driving factor that lead me here, and that has shaped me more than anything else in my life, failure.
Nearing the end of high school, I found my purpose, the exact moment was probably just after breaking my arm playing rugby in grade 11, as the ambulance drove me away from the school field I figured out how I could help people the way I wanted to, while avoiding becoming stuck behind a desk and paperwork, a fear that has only cemented itself as I’ve grown. I had decided to pursue paramedicine, I had always loved science, specifically excelling in biology, and the fast, hardworking, never sleeping pace was something that enthralled me rather than worried me about a career, it was all of the things I wanted. To my own credit once I had finally decided this, I committed to it fully, as much as a slacker 15-year-old can, I doubled my effort in all my classes, started going to every class, and had even decided to take an extra semester on my path to becoming a paramedic, to better my grades and make sure I stood out from the hundreds of other applicants to every college paramedic program possible. Unbelievably, it all worked, and I had transformed myself from a failing student in grade 11 to early acceptance in Georgian Colleges paramedic program.
Every professor, and nearly every student, knows the classic post-secondary trope about how you were top of your class, now the entire class is people who were the top of their class. Now, I’m 18 at the time of hearing this, and had just gone through a multi years’ worth of change and challenge to become one of the few straight out of high school acceptances into this program, and my cockiness, my overly large ego was even bigger then it is now, ballooning out of control as I got higher grades and more accomplishments to a point that this fairly classic speech from every first year class and college movie managed to make zero impact on me. I can make a million excuses for things that happened that semester, for things pushing me one way or another, but at the end of it, I had failed. I was young, immature, and I had utterly failed at one of the only real goals I had ever set for myself. I can’t exaggerate at how hard this failure was for me, I had never before in my life failed to this degree, to spend years working at something and to so instantly see thousands of dollars and all the efforts completely washed away, almost in a blink, I felt ruined.
This brings me the second major failure that led me to where I am now. Following that failure were months of unemployment, wasting time, wasting away, whatever cute allegories people use for the more “transitional” times when they look back on them. Eventually I landed a good, stable job at a factory, mindless work that let me use half of my brain to excel and get paid more than I was worth by a long shot. I was feeling almost content, drinking away half my paycheck and still having more than enough for rent, eating out constantly, I once got sent on a business trip to Alabama. I felt like a big boy, and had settled into calling this a very possible career. It took me nearly two years to snap out of this, I finally at some point woke up form an almost fog like state to realize that instead of failing, in my avoidance of failing I had become a failure. I was living terribly, acting completely awfully to those around me, and that in settling for a “career” doing what I was doing, I was allowing everything to pass me by. This was one of the other prominent hits I have taken on my educational journey, and this exact moment, realizing how terrible I really felt, is what pushed me to go back to education, to take stock in what I love, and figure out a way to do that through school and a career.
Those two moments of realization, two moments covered in complete failure, that were both entirely by my own hand, is what led me to outdoor adventure education. I realized that camping and leading those trips with groups of friends were some of my happiest memories and my biggest passion, and decided to directly pursue that. It was through that program, Outdoor Adventure Education at Fleming College, that led me to adventure therapy. To me this became an obsession, a way to bridge my want of helping people with my biggest passion with my love of the wilderness. I have always believed that the wilderness brings change in people, using that in a specific and almost calculated way to truly change the way a person thinks and goes through their life, it’s a concept that I am still obsessed with, clearly.
These are what drove me to this program, my direct obsession around what adventure therapy as a concept is, and could be, as well as the major failings that ruined and then rebuilt the way I think about things or go about my life.