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3000 words, about a dollar a word, for the reinstatement of my financial aid.......
2005-07-14 - 5:20 a.m.

To the Financial Aid Appeals Committee of Towson University,

My name is Michael Bennett and I am writing to you in an attempt to reinstate my financial aid for your university. When I was given this letter in the mail, I was very discouraged and displeased by this event for a long while, but I can understand why you would withhold much needed student funds from someone that on paper, seems unable to excel or make the most out of his/her college experience. I realize that it is a tough, yet necessary step to guide students and make an effort of giving an understanding of the importance of a college education and the services that you provide. I used to hate the idea of explaining myself to anyone, but I will try my best to explain my actions that led me to my current academic standing.

I never really had an idea of what I wanted out of high school. I never really looked past it. I assumed college of some sort but I never applied myself or knew the importance of attending university past �because your parents want you to.� In high school, they give you a guidance counselor that supposedly directs you and give you facts about college-educated incomes vs. non-college educated incomes. You hear stories from older brothers and sisters about the crazy happenings: parties, guys/girls, etc. You even hear war stories from your parents about school and the crazy crap they did and label this as �the most exciting time of your life.� They were all great facts and all, but I couldn�t even get past thinking about the girl I had a crush on. I couldn�t think past making something of myself because I never really even considered confronting it and figuring out who I really was.

And this is how I entered higher education. Many enter college this way and with even less guidance then what I had. I never was a stellar student past 10th grade. Before that, I was a Talented and Gifted kid, avid reader, and even took the ACT in 7th grade as a part of a Duke talent search. I grew up an army brat and moved quite extensively in my childhood. It was rough having to go from school to school and constantly being the stranger, but I had to endure it. My grades took a turn when my family moved after my father�s army retirement. I basically grew up in and around Texas for the most part and developed some strong friendships that unfortunately had to be severed right before my teenage years. It was tough on my whole family and both my parents worked constantly while my older brother and lived latchkey lives in northwest Georgia with no friends and no neighbors to talk to. This is where I started my life as a young adult and affected me profoundly. The innocence of childhood wore off, the self-consciousness of a young adult set in, and I had no one to talk to about it. This is when I learned how to be silent.

I developed a weight problem in Georgia in my teenage years. I was a growing boy that did nothing but stay inside, because I had no friends and lived on the side of a highway. At one point, I was fast approaching 300lbs upon my entrance into high school. This excess weight gain gave me health problems. I developed symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea then. I dozed off on car rides longer then 10 minutes long. I would lose concentration and feel depressed from my improper sleep. I couldn�t focus as much or have the drive to do anything with the same vigor of my earlier years. I carried this problem with me for 6 years and did nothing to treat it. I did not appreciate myself or have the self-respect to even take care of myself because in my mind, it did not even matter to me.

I attended the rest of my high school and most of my college basically half passed out. It wasn�t uncommon for me to conk out in the middle of a lecture or in the middle of studying a chapter of a textbook. It was hard enough to find the drive in myself, let alone the focus to do my weekly readings for courses. At best, I would procrastinate and cram my way through 90% of my courses with average results. The only reason I think I lasted that long was because I thought that�s what was expected of me from my folks and I never really took the time confront my own goals, wants, and feelings which in turn making things worse. You feel bad about yourself and you look for the obvious things that annoy you and commence finger pointing. You almost feel the need to feel bad about yourself and feel you deserve it because you did something foolish or did not achieve something to the best of your ability. I loathed myself intensely and occasionally lashed out at the bureaucracy of school. I never looked further into why things were the way they were, I saw things only up close and apart from me. I grew up a competitive person and that background mutated into something of a harsh personal criticism of anything I did.

I kept most everything internalized from my family and friends through my tenure at college. I hid my grades from my parents and surprisingly, they stopped asking to see them after awhile. Our communication gap grew and grew. I witnessed the emotional hardships my brother went through, particularly with my father, throughout his entire college career. Needless to say it scared me. My father was and still is devoted to preaching the gospel of going to college, but he never really cared for any interests beyond that or encourages any of our personal pursuits. As long as it was �college� he didn�t care what you took and could care less about the things my brother and I wanted or achieved. He was and still is a self-made man that came from basically nothing and much of this drive he has possessed has made him a successful career man, but more of a distant father. He�s a loving man and although I can understand many of his sacrifices for my brother and I, I would of liked to see some of them change.

The illusionary reasons that kept me in college diminished. I guess it�s safe to say that this is where my learning phase of college kicked in. I transferred to Towson University for one thing in particular-I wanted to study electronic media and film. When I came over from Frostburg, I was a C student and took only a handful of poor mass communication courses. When I first arrived, I wasn�t impressed and more or less frustrated with all the transferring credits I had to do and basic courses I would have to retake. It seemed to me like a trip to an amusement park sized MVA. At the time, I was still not sleeping well with the untreated sleep apnea and going through a breakup with a girlfriend. My first semester wasn�t the happiest of times and the early morning hour commutes through rush hour traffic to get to a boring and extensive film course did not excite me. I became more and more irritated with the college education system itself. I was dying to pick up a camera, edit a film, but I was in class talking about Marlene Dietrich and her face illuminated with extra foot-candles. The only EMF course that I did half decent in was the Film I course. At the same time, I was trying to get all my Gen. Ed�s out of the way. I transferred late and needed an advanced English and the only thing left was a Women�s Words, Women�s Writing course. At the time, I took it as a joke and just wanted my credit to focus on more �important� things.

But as the exploratory nature of college washed over me, I became deeply vested in Women�s Studies courses. It soon became my major, because I couldn�t stand the pretentiousness of film students or the waiting period to just make films. It dawned on me that college was meant to be a learning experience and with women�s studies, a subject inherently foreign to me was a wealth of new knowledge and ideas instead of pretty standard film theory and instruction you could learn from watching movies and picking up your own camera. Women Studies took everything I knew about life and flipped it over. It was very insightful in finding out about the world around me and it fascinated me immensely. The professors of Women Studies were the first people to challenge me to really see things through my own eyes and not encourage me to create or think in a popularized way.

Even with this newfound desire, I still battled with my Sleep Apnea. I didn�t start any treatment for it until my 2nd semester at Towson. It took a near death experience behind the wheel, with my mother and brother riding with me while I dozed off at the wheel to seek medical help. It puzzles me why my mother never did anything about my condition. She is a nurse and even hinted at my symptoms but I never complained to her, I just was a sleepy fat kid in my own personal opinion. It took 6 years and maybe a few hundred dozing-off incidents at the wheel before I saw a doctor. For this, I can only blame myself for endangering my personal safety and the safety of others for so long. I really had no regard for my own life at the time and looking back, it feels as if I lived a hazy dream for 6 years of my life, 6 years I can�t ever get back. I can�t blame my academic standing on this condition however because I chose to live with this affliction despite all signs pointing to extreme sleep deprivation as the culprit. I wet the bed, I passed out during lectures, and I drove with friends in my car that fought with me to keep me up to make it home in one piece. I let this all happen and did nothing about it for 6 years.

I felt a deep shame and pain within myself. I felt lost and alone for a long time. I interacted with friends and family, but deep down I felt a growing emptiness inside me. I confided in fewer and fewer people. I had my heart broken with my first love. I couldn�t allow myself to be an emotional wreck on the outside. I internalized so much pain within myself, some days I just shook in pain. This feeling grew and grew until I decided to accept it and give in to it. I imagined myself as a conduit in which could flow through, all the world�s joys and pains, an object of the landscape and not a human being. I wished to give myself up completely and vanish. Despite receiving Bi-Pap sleep treatment for my sleep apnea during my 2nd semester, I still felt empty inside. I could sleep and wake up like a normal person but I still felt empty inside and now 6 years behind. Course work became less and less important as I felt less and less important. I made a pact with myself that I would die at the age 25.

It was sort of humorous at the time because it almost seemed like if you know your number, you�ll probably get more done and I did. I did nothing for myself other then trying to achieve this goal in being a nothing in the world. I constantly flirted with the idea of just disappearing one day. I announced to my friends that I was �retired� from intimate relationships. I poured myself into making movies for my friends. I used to go on long drives in my truck and look to the side of the road and cry because I knew I could just swerve and end it. I felt so much pain and whenever I had the clear head to go through with it, it was as if nature, or fate, or a phone call, or a song from the stereo that tapped me on my shoulder and made me realize the world in all it�s beauty. I dropped out of school. I felt a deep shame in letting my family down. I could no longer devote myself to learning in school because I did not want to make anything of myself. I wanted to erase myself. I stopped showing up for classes in the 3rd semester toward the last 4 weeks of school. I couldn�t get papers done and reports and I spent most my time just wandering the campus or driving alone. I knew I would come to a crossroads in where I had to make a decision of going through with my idea of disappearing or telling my folks that I couldn�t hack it in school.

I felt more and more like an invalid parasite to my family. I couldn�t bear to let them know or leave them without a trace. I had no way out and even called in desperation a mental health place that took in �emergencies� but was just further frustrated by the fact you needed a doctor�s referral to be admitted. I was close to leaving with just clothes on my back, but I decided to tell the bad news to my family and how I felt which really didn�t help much. They weren�t amused at all. It was first time I expressed myself and let this pain out and I created a storm of frustration. I never cried so hard in my life. They accepted it with a heavy hand. I withdrew from university in shame. I still felt depressed, I got a job, and I saved all my money to buy film and video equipment for my friends. I became even more sacrificial of myself. I still intended to die at 25 and work hard to help imagine the dreams of my friends making independent short films. I already considered myself a lost cause in love and in life, so devoting my energy to them seemed like the only way to expel the remaining life out of my body. For a time, I lost all sense of my own humanity.

To my amazement, while working at my factory job, I realized I retained much of my teachings. All I could do at my job was think, because the work was essentially mindless. I began approaching the menial factory work as 12 hour shifts of meditation that I got paid for. Sociological issues, gender issues, the socioeconomic issues presented themselves in the eyes of my co-workers. It was almost as if I could write a book myself about what I saw play out right in front of me in this blue-collar work. It peaked my interest to learn again. I intended to read books once more, picking up profound works that awakened my humanity like Steppenwolf and Demian by Hesse, The Fountainhead by Rand, On Liberty by Mill, and the collected works of Jiddu Krisnamurti. I even pursued love again and initiated the groundwork for setting goals for myself. I opened up and felt free to express myself once more after a terribly long absence. Since this re-awakening, I�ve slowly come to realize that my life will not be squandered. At present, I have seen my friend�s dreams and mine come true with our independent films showing around the nation, winning awards, and gaining a following in Baltimore. My efforts in financially backing our collective have paid off immensely with our production values and our promotional website, www.betterhollywood.com. I have a loving, brilliant girlfriend who has listened and supported me throughout my recent hardships and I am surrounded by a group of amazing friends and a supportive family that have walked with me through this whole ordeal. This path of life wasn�t definitely the prettiest, but I would not have it any other way.

My intention is to finish my college education in Women�s Studies at Towson University. I don�t intend to right a wrong or ask for preferential treatment in this matter. Financially, it�s hard. Mentally, it�s even harder. I have no illusions to hide behind and only massive ground to catch up. I see through it all and I will finish my studies because that is what I truly want. To raise my grades, I will retake all of my courses that I received WX�s in my major. I am willing to participate in and comply with any and all academic advisory counseling/guidance required by the university or my major. I will not hesitate to request help or assistance in any way on any of my studies. To ensure that I know the resources for tutoring, guidance, and information in my major and for this university, I ask that I be specifically given as a volunteer to a student service organization such as the Women�s Center or an aide to the Women Studies faculty. Most importantly however, I will offer complete disclosure to those that support me in any way, namely my parents, mentors, and friends of my intentions and my goals.

I hope that this catharsis of mine will offer enough insight to make a decision in my financial aid standing. If you require any more information or my presence, please do not hesitate to contact me at: [email protected] or by phone: XXX XXX XXXX. I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak and this experience alone has helped me greatly further solidify my goals and give me more understanding of my past, present, and future.


Sincerely,

Mike Bennett



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