Regrets...I've had a Few

I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on regrets, because I don't really have that many. Or rather, I don't have that many small, insignificant ones that occupy a space in my fretting box. But I have a couple of biggies that come up from time to time. The one I take out and examine most often is I wish I would have stayed in college when I was young and finished at least a Bachelor's degree. Two things happened to cause me to veer off-course in that regard -- one, I was never an enthusiastic student. I did enough to keep my grades above a D, but I never pushed myself -- especially in the classes I didn't like or that didn't come easily. Put another way, I got "A"s in any English or Writing class I ever took, and was thrilled when I was able to pull a "C" in math or science. When I was about to go into my Senior year of high school, my advisor called me in and said, "I'm not sure how this happened, but you've managed to get through 3 years of high school without having taken a single math class. You are going to have to at least pass Freshman Algebra in order to graduate!" So I, grudgingly, took and passed the class (and, to my knowledge, have never once used anything I learned in that class!). So when it came time for college, I signed up for academic classes like a good girl, along with the theater classes I was really interested in. Soon, I was blowing off boring academic classes and spending all my time in the theater department, cultivating my dramatic identity (which mostly consisted of smoking long, brown More cigarettes and developing mad crushes on every gay guy in the theater department (aka -- every guy in the theater department). Fast forward a couple years and I have given up the idea of going into the theater and have gotten a job, which was reason #2 I didn't make school a priority. I got a really good job as an office manager for a computer supply company and it paid me WAY more than I should have been earning at 21 years old. My friends were all in the college trenches, living on Top Ramen and washing clothes in the bathtub because no quarters for the machine. I was buying a new car and getting myself into all kinds of credit-card debt (another cautionary tale for another time). I half-heartedly kept signing up for classes at the local JC, but always found reason to blow them off -- mostly because I had never developed any study discipline and found it too easy to procrastinate and do a half-assed job. Fast forward to now. I am going through a self-guided course to prep to sit for the CAPM (Certified Associate Project Manager) exam. Before I began, I developed a study schedule for myself with specific goals and methodology. And, although I am following it to the letter and it's working, I still struggle with that discipline, with focusing on the study and content retention -- the 50-year-old-brain is simply not as nimble as the 20-year-old brain. I have been thinking a lot about that long-held regret of not getting a degree and wondering whether I should take the leap and go back to college now, in the latter half of my life. I know it's not too late, but its such a big leap. Especially since what I REALLY would love to do is to go back and get a law degree. Oy vey, the very thought both intrigues me AND makes me nauseous. Doable? Yes, probably, but not without a huge upheaval in our lives and budget. Daunting? Oh yeah. Exciting to consider? Oh yeah.