Fafsa merry-go-round
Jul. 27th, 2021 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven_cromwellCut for kvetching about my utter college-related stupidity. Under a cut, for kvetching about personal college-related stupidity.
Am going to have to delay my first term till Jan, and fuck it's galling. Scaldingly, ferociously humiliating to have made a deeply stupid, entirely foreseeable mistake and hamstrung myself. I'd been told back in...January, maybe, that I needed to go ahead and complete the Fafsa. But I didn't know where I wanted to go, or even if I'd be able to start in this academic year.
And I was still so caught in grief that I simultaneously took in the advice on one level, but it also felt like distant, almost meaningless buzzing. It was solid and practical, and yet even contemplating adding one other thing onto the mountain of just...learning to exist in a world without my favorite human made the mountain unscaleable.
Inevitably, though, the grief wore away and spring came again and I started thinking about community colleges that offered online programs, so I could adjust to academic workload again without adding commute and all the other disability nightmares atop it.
Found one, too, with an associate’s degree in history, guaranteed pathway to transfer all credits to an in-state four-year. And then, those calls of do your Fafsa in January started to make a lot more sense.
Because, of course, I'd missed the priority deadlines for financial aid. Have all my documents in hand--and in some ways it's probably a good thing!--I didn't do the Fafsa in Jan, because I found out about several state grants connected directly to the Fafsa I hadn't known about before. God, it's not even that much of a delay from September to January. But oh, the brain-weasels are having a field day. (29 and you can't even fill out a fafsa on time this is why you burned out before oh you'll do just grand. Say the self-loathing demons on loop, staccato as bass in music, feeling just as inevitable as any downbeat.)
I'll be ok; I've learned to ignore the self-loathing demons a while ago. And on the positive column: I've established contact with the college, have log-ins now for the fafsa and all my grants, have meaningful volunteer work I'm really loving doing and can devote a few extra months too. I can even make up the lost time in a summer term if I'm feeling up to it. It's just such an...amateur’s mistake.
Have so many happy things to talk about, including a whole boatload of book recs I want to get to within the next couple weeks.
Am going to have to delay my first term till Jan, and fuck it's galling. Scaldingly, ferociously humiliating to have made a deeply stupid, entirely foreseeable mistake and hamstrung myself. I'd been told back in...January, maybe, that I needed to go ahead and complete the Fafsa. But I didn't know where I wanted to go, or even if I'd be able to start in this academic year.
And I was still so caught in grief that I simultaneously took in the advice on one level, but it also felt like distant, almost meaningless buzzing. It was solid and practical, and yet even contemplating adding one other thing onto the mountain of just...learning to exist in a world without my favorite human made the mountain unscaleable.
Inevitably, though, the grief wore away and spring came again and I started thinking about community colleges that offered online programs, so I could adjust to academic workload again without adding commute and all the other disability nightmares atop it.
Found one, too, with an associate’s degree in history, guaranteed pathway to transfer all credits to an in-state four-year. And then, those calls of do your Fafsa in January started to make a lot more sense.
Because, of course, I'd missed the priority deadlines for financial aid. Have all my documents in hand--and in some ways it's probably a good thing!--I didn't do the Fafsa in Jan, because I found out about several state grants connected directly to the Fafsa I hadn't known about before. God, it's not even that much of a delay from September to January. But oh, the brain-weasels are having a field day. (29 and you can't even fill out a fafsa on time this is why you burned out before oh you'll do just grand. Say the self-loathing demons on loop, staccato as bass in music, feeling just as inevitable as any downbeat.)
I'll be ok; I've learned to ignore the self-loathing demons a while ago. And on the positive column: I've established contact with the college, have log-ins now for the fafsa and all my grants, have meaningful volunteer work I'm really loving doing and can devote a few extra months too. I can even make up the lost time in a summer term if I'm feeling up to it. It's just such an...amateur’s mistake.
Have so many happy things to talk about, including a whole boatload of book recs I want to get to within the next couple weeks.
