Not Just My Degree
"I should be a statistic. I should be one of those numbers, but I'm not. Somehow, I survived." – Angela Tindell-Gula
Angela Tindell-Gula '24, a creative writing major from Three Rivers and SAMP ambassador, was one of three student speakers at HCC's first-ever Fall Graduate Reception on Wednesday, Nov. 29, where she gave the following remarks. The owner of Tranquility Salon in Palmer, she will be attending Westfield State University in the spring.
'When the COVID-19 pandemic took the world over, like so many others, my life turned upside down. I am a small business owner, and my salon had to close immediately, without any warning. I had two young children, a house, bills, and a fear that my shop would become yet another victim of the pandemic.
With more and more normalcy being stripped away from my daily life and a continually growing amount of spare time on my hands, I decided to let my impulses take over and filled out my application to enroll at Holyoke Community College. You see, where I grew up, the most important skill I could have acquired was to survive. It sounds simple enough in theory – to just survive – but when you grow up in poverty, surrounded by drugs and alcohol in situations that children shouldn't be put in, it's hard to imagine what life could look like outside of the lines of survival mode.
No one in my household or neighborhood ever dreamed of going to college. It was not a privilege that was given to people like us. My parent's hopes for me was to get a decent job at the local mill yard behind our red brick apartment building or to move up the ranks at the local grocery store. It was important to them that I graduated high school, but anything else was extra time that I couldn't afford to waste.
As I started to get older, I tried to walk a straight line and stay out of trouble, which was hard to do, especially when the people I loved and grew up with, the people I surrounded myself with, started to succumb to the trauma of our youths and became another number in the rapidly growing opioid crisis.
But this is where our roads started to fork. This is when I started to have hope that there could be something more than surviving. Our paths continued to drift even further apart. While their anger and sorrow made them turn in more on themselves, mine made me fight harder to break cycles and move forward.
Which I did, as I became a wife and a mother, and with that came the comfort and stability that I had always hoped to find. I still dreamt that school was a possibility but as time has a funny way of doing, it flew by faster and faster each year. There was no free time. There was work and diaper changes, laundry, and baseball games, more work, grocery shopping, dance lessons, packing snacks, doctor's appointments, and before I knew it, 20 years had gone by since I graduated high school, and I was living with two teenagers who longed for independence and freedom from me, and then before I could find my footing, the world as we knew it changed, and I had nothing but time – or at least in that moment I did, and the rest was history
No one could prepare you for how hard going back to school as an adult would be. Working three jobs while being a full-time student, raising a family and trying not to lose my mind was nearly impossible. Sleep deprivation is a lot harder to recover from when you're almost 40 rather than 18. Most days I leave my house by 6:30 in the morning, and I don't get home after 10 at night. Then that's when the homework starts.
There were nights I would prop my book up in my window sill above my kitchen sink while washing dishes at 2:30 in the morning just so I would stay awake to get my reading done.
I have done schoolwork in four different states. I've written papers while braiding hair backstage at dance competitions. I would do research for assignments while sitting on the sidelines waiting for my son's games to start. There was not one free moment. Every single minute was accounted for. It was hard, I had days when I thought I would die from pure exhaustion, but I made it through.
Every day I fold my life lessons from the past and tuck them safely inside my backpack, and that gives me the drive to put one foot in front of the other.
This degree is not just "my" degree; it is for all of those kids that never made it out of the neighborhood or off of the street, for all the kids that were counted out before they even began. I should be a statistic. I should be one of those numbers, but I'm not. Somehow I survived.
At this point in my life, I know more people who have died from overdoses than anything else combined. It is heavy carrying the weight of so many ghosts on my shoulders but that no longer outweighs the hope I have that life can be something more. The great Maya Angelou once said, 'as you grow older you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.'
If it was not for the helping hands of others, I wouldn't be here today."
PHOTO: Angela Tindell-Gula
