au·to·di·dact /ˌɔtoʊˈdaɪdækt, -daɪˈdækt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[aw-toh-dahy-dakt, -dahy-dakt]–noun a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.

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I have been meaning to address this subject on my blog for quite some time now, but my own laziness and waning obsession of mortaring the chip on my shoulder has prevented me from doing so. Several of you have asked me about my life immediately following high school, and I thought tonight would be a good time to try to explain.

Those of you who didn't know me when I was 16 (and there are a lot of you out there) did not know me during the tremulous period when I decided that I would rebuke everything I had ever been taught and, as my mom liked to put it, "go my own way." You know, like the Fleetwood Mac song.

I will save you the tiny violin playing in the background and just summarize my misery from the time I turned 12 until the time I graduated high school: I went from a diverse, welcoming elementary school filled with Caucasians, African Americans, Latinos and everything in between, to a locked-down middle school seething with privileged, close-minded upper-class brats. While my mom will bristle at the mention that I would have been happier had we never moved across town, I maintain that the world I was thrown into, after being the shining star of my lower middle class elementary school, was like tossing a silver band into a bucket of pennies and wondering why it rusted over.

School consumed me for about five years - all of middle school and two years of high school. I found solace in daydreaming about the one thing I couldn't have -- horses. During middle and high school, the daydream turned into an all-out obsession, a way of escaping the perils of not having the right kind of jean shorts or sitting at the correct lunch table. Even my sophomore year, when I ran track and found a semblance of a group of friends, I was miserable. I feared school like some people fear cockroaches or snakes. And it wasn't the tests or the homework that scared me. It was the edifice, the hulking building at the end of the street, the people contained within the walls who -- whether true or not -- conspired to ridicule me and taunt me. I developed what I now think was a social anxiety disorder. I feared sleep overs and dances, school retreats and pep rallies. I dreaded track meets -- the thought of having to perform and actually run in front of people would make my heart pound in my ears at night.

My perspective changed in one summer. Not more than a month after I turned sixteen, I drove myself out to the barn one day. This was a huge feat for me -- what most people don't understand is that people like myself who didn't own horses were frowned upon for being at the barn when it wasn't time for their lesson. I would go once a week, ride whatever horse I was assigned to for the evening, and then immediately go home. There was no hanging out in the lounge with the other girls who had expensive ponies. But for some reason, one day I decided to drive myself to the barn, and just be with horses.

This turned into the owner of the barn, perhaps wondering why I was sitting quietly on the deck, staring at the people riding, asking me if I wanted a job painting jumps over the summer. You would have thought he had offered me a shuttle ride to the moon. I was so shocked that all I could stutter out was "Sure."

Painting jumps evolved into me being assigned as a "working student" to the person who later became my mentor, coworker, running partner, and friend, Kelly. Kelly was a professional rider at the barn, basically a free agent of sorts riding horses and teaching lessons. The only word that seems appropriate now for how I felt about Kelly would be that I idolized her. I placed her on a pedestal and tied myself to the pedestal, convinced that wherever the pedestal went, I would follow. I feared her and admired her to the point of infatuation, like any impressionable teenager will do when placed in the path of someone they see as being all-knowing and all-powerful.

Kelly got stuck with me as much as I got stuck with her. She relied on me to get her horses ready for her and then take care of them when she was done, and I relied on her to teach me everything I now know. She started giving me lessons for free and finding horses for me to ride so I could ride more often. She talked the owners of the barn into letting me have a free lease on an amazing show horse that they owned so I could compete for a year. She told people who were going out of town that I could ride their horses for them while they were gone, and they trusted her enough to let a scummy lesson person like myself ride their horse. Then people started realizing that I actually could ride and they started paying me to ride their horses. Opportunity after opportunity opened up and it was like 11 years of frustration had finally produced something concrete. Eleven years of flapping my wings and getting nowhere had finally turned into me moving forward.

During the summer that I first worked for Kelly, I realized how fast things were moving forward for me and it hit me that there was no way I was going to stop on the path I had started down. I also realized that the misery I felt in school was something I could either try to ignore or attack head on.

I concocted a plan of graduating early, riding horses for a year and then the "ellipses" would kick in. I never looked past the year after I graduated, figuring I would either go to school or keep on riding. So, when I went into my junior year, I added a zero hour, dropped my lunch and crammed all of my courses into my final year of high school. I had the worst schedule in the world - my English IV AP class came before my English III Pre-AP class, but I didn't care. I was doing something and I was going to get out.

Because of the summer before I graduated, and the new sense of control over my life, I was empowered. I was stressed out beyond belief but empowered. People couldn't understand why I wasn't applying to colleges or why I was graduating early at all. I would argue at length with naysayers who would try to tell me I was making a horrible mistake and that if I didn't go to college, my life was basically a black hole. I had my argument down to a fine art. I debated that college had become a warehouse for people who didn't know what they wanted to do, an extension of high school where you could drink and not be in your parent's house, a social event more than an educational one. My desperate need to escape the social atmosphere of my high school was enough to make me paralyzed with fear at the thought of immersing myself in college.

During my last year of high school, at the library one day, I found a book. Shocking that I found anything at all in our terrible high school library. I still don't really remember how I stumbled across it (maybe The Madwoman does?). I just remember grabbing it, reading it, and feeling like I was finally talking to someone who understood.

The book was called The Day I Became An Autodidact, by Kendall Hailey. Written in the eighties, she dropped out of high school at sixteen, and chronicled her decision to leave formal education. Instead, she read Anna Karenina and studied current politics. Her frankness was refreshing - here was a girl, a published author no less, telling me it's okay. You don't have to do what everyone else does just for the sake of staying with the norm.

I don't think my family actually thought I could do it. Frankly even the last day of school I kept expecting the assistant principal to call me in and tell me I was one credit short or something. For months after, I would have nightmares that I would wake up and I'd be in school again. But it never happened. I was free.

I was very, very lucky. And then again, I have grown enough to acknowledge that a lot of what looks like "luck" to some people was actually just grit, determination and desire. I was a stalwart defender of my own ideology. Even now when I think about it, I realize that I could never do it again. I don't think I will ever be able to fight against that overwhelming current like I did for over two years. When I think about myself and who I was, my conviction was not so much in myself but in my own doctrine.

Opportunities opened up for me. Some say luck is being prepared for opportunities. And some say problems are opportunities in disguise. All of this I have experienced first hand. I graduated in May of 2001, one month after turning seventeen. Less than a year after graduating, I was riding million-dollar horses in Dallas. In September of 2002, I helped Kelly start what now is Madrone Ranch Stables.

Madrone Ranch was my education, my four-year degree in business, psychology, veterinary medicine, Spanish, immigration law, and management. I learned more about the real world than anyone my age just stumbling off of their graduation cruise could read about in a book. I'm proud of who I was when I started at Madrone but even more proud of what it taught me and who I became.

College is not for everyone. There are those who thrive on it - people who need and want the environment that it provides. There are people who must go through with it - doctors, lawyers and teachers. But there are those people who need more than a diploma to grow. Sometimes you have to hold what it is that you want in your hands, and grasp on tightly, and pull yourself toward that desire. You can find education wherever you want - but an education in life is something that no student loan can ever buy.

In May, it will have been six years since I graduated high school. In those six years, I have learned my own capabilities and my own flaws. I have gone from idolizing a mentor to realizing that perhaps I should put myself up on that pedestal. My insecurities caused by high school have started to fade, like a painful sunburn peeling away in layers. And Kendall Hailey, whom I ran across in this blog today, is still prospering. She's not living in a paper bag or shooting up heroin on some smelly street corner. I am proud of her and I am proud of myself - for we learned one of the most life-changing lessons of all.