Posted 1st May 2013 1925

I’m 21 and live in Asia. All my peers have already graduated college a year ago, and I’m still floundering around. Heck, my little sister graduated college just this year, and is on her first year of med school, where I should already be in, but is now an option no longer possible for me.

I had gotten kicked out in my first college, an elite college in my country and am on the verge of getting kicked out of my second one, a local college and the only college that would take me, both times due to problems with my attendance and requirement submission.

I know that I’ve wasted around six years of tuition, and my parents, God bless them, are running out of money. Being the incredibly supportive and good people they are, my parents asked me about why I couldn’t finish like my siblings, and if I wanted to shift out of my current course into something I wanted, just in case that was the cause of me not being able to keep up with my studies.

The thing is that my problem really is partly because I’m stuck in a course that I have absolutely no passion for and that I had rushed into when I got kicked out of pre-med and my previous college, in the hopes that I could appease my parents and grind through college so I could start working (it’s almost absolutely impossible to find any sort of legal work in my country if you aren’t a college graduate, not even a clerk/cashier part-time job).

Now, with my parents asking, I wonder if I really deserve to be able to switch courses AGAIN, and go through even more years of college. I wonder if I should be allowed to pursue my dreams, or if I should just grit my teeth and suck it up for their sake.

I know I’m a failure as a son, and have cost my parents so much money and time, not to mention heartbreak and disappointment. I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. My siblings, they greet with proud gazes and loving tones. They look and talk to me with tolerance that’s barely there at best and downright contempt at worst. At the darkest of times, I hear them talking (not at all often, and I don’t think they knew I was there) about simply stopping my education. That’s the equivalent of disowning me. Sometimes, it’s gotten so bad that I thought of killing myself just so they could be rid of the financial burden. Of course, the one reason I’ve never gone through with it is because I know that it would hurt them. I’ve already hurt my parents enough.

However hurt I get from them acting that way, I deserve the hurt I feel from them, because I’ve hurt them so much. That’s why I’m wondering if I should try to shift courses and follow my dream. Do I even deserve to be happy after everything I’ve put my parents through?

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