Walter Scott Jr., a prominent Omaha philanthropist, recently passed away at 90. I had a link to him: for a couple years, I threw his money down the toilet.
I was a Walter Scott, Jr. Scholarship recipient in the college of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) at UNO. I found out a few weeks before I graduated high school, and having applied to too few other colleges, I had already decided to attend UNO anyway, to stay close to my high school girlfriend. At my parents' urging, I called to check in on my application - because I had never heard anything - and they called me back the next day to tell me I had been accepted!
Walter Scott had big plans for the IS&T program at UNO in 1999, but at the time it was just the Peter Kiewit Institute for Technology and a lot of empty land. I was most of the way through my first semester when I fell into a severe depression. I ended the semester with two A's, a D, and two F's. Two weeks into the spring semester, I stopped attending classes altogether.
That May, my parents helped me make an appeal to Scott's scholarship administrator to reinstate me that fall, given that I was undergoing treatment and, we believed, showing progress. They agreed. This time, I was an inaugural resident in the new Scott Dorms, intending to focus myself on school life.
I didn't. I moved in, but only lived there a week. I never attended a single class. Over Thanksgiving, my dad went and got my stuff out of my dorm - I was too ashamed and embarrassed, I couldn't face my dorm mates. I couldn't even admit to myself what I had done - I didn't have the strength to face the darkness of my own failings.
It took me almost a decade to fully recover from depression, during which time I developed myriad coping mechanisms. One of these was to "reverse engineer" equanimity for my life situation - whenever I made a mistake, I would say to myself: who was I to have known where that decision would lead me? I was an 18-year old whose naiveté and ignorance were not only plausible, but to be expected. The consequences of my actions, I concluded, were tragic, but they could hardly have been avoided.
It took me many more years to fully internalize my sense of personal accountability, and to think frankly about what I threw away - not just a philanthropist's money, but my own opportunities, and time. And yet, to try to dig the root cause out of the past - not my academic failure or depression, but the behavior that precipitated those - seems so intractable as to be pointless. Those propensities were a part of myself as far back in my memory as I can reach. It was inevitable that I would have to face them. Could I have maneuvered around them so as to limit the damage? The question seems detached, by my estimation, from reality.
A different question: was I predestined to this particular outcome, or should I have been more accountable?
Well, both, along a continuum, I guess. The reconciliation of the two requires a belief that every day is an opportunity to become a better version of ourselves. If I lacked resilience from a young age, then the right time to start building resilience was whenever I became aware I needed more. Same with temperament, same with discipline, same with patience, same with focus, same with anything. And it's still true.
We can all fall victim to the vicissitudes of life. But resilience is our defense, and even without knowing where I would've ended up, I do wish I would have known the value of possessing resilience earlier.
