Dear Facebook,
You keep asking me: “where did you go to College?” and you are making suggestions based on where some of my friends studied.
If you must know, I went to the Université du Sud Toulon-Var, France (it was called Université de Toulon et du Var or UTV twenty years ago).
I don’t give details about my college education on my Facebook page because I had an abortion there that changed my life for the worst, I dropped out and I don’t have a college degree.
I was studying Applied Foreign Languages (English and Spanish) and hoping to become an international librarian. My grades were so low my freshman year that I had to transfer to an institute of technology where I studied marketing for a year before giving up on higher education entirely.
Fall 1993 to Summer 1995 was the period of my “sexual liberation”. I wasn’t raised in a religious home but my father was abusive and I wanted revenge, freedom and love. Instead, I became both an actor and a victim of the hookup culture, the ultimate form of human worship in our society. As a predictable consequence, a child was sacrificed on that godless altar and a mother was wounded for life.
At the institute of technology, I did a presentation about abortion rights in French class. A boy made a derogatory comment, I got angry and blurted out: “it happened to me and you don’t know what you‘re talking about”. I was in a survival/rationalization mode and I was defending abortion while (already) saying that abortion hurts women. I wish I had kept a written version of the presentation (few people used computers back then).
A couple of days later, I had a panic attack in the same classroom and my body became as cold as ice. They called the paramedics and I received a Valium injection to calm me down. This happened one year after an early, drug induced abortion that supposedly would allow me “to go back to a normal life”. I suffered many other panic attacks and bouts of depression the following years.
What did I gain from my two college years? No degree but an abortion that would not go away.
There is nothing regarding my education that I could add to my Facebook profile to help people know me better. I’m not interested in being re-reacquainted with old boyfriends either. People can read my blog 400WordsForWomen.com or listen to my testimony on Silent No More’s website.
But you know what, Facebook? I have been learning a lot at Married Love & Experimental Parenthood Academy, at Face Your Past And Own Your MistakesCollege.
I have a degree in It’s OK To Ask For Help and I’m currently pursuing lifelong studies in Loving God And My Neighbor at Neither Do I Condemn You, Go And Sin No More University. So next time you ask me where I went to college, I might just add that to my profile.
