I pull into the same parking spot I use almost every weekday, the one painted with the white wheelchair outlined in robin’s egg blue located directly in front of The Stream, Edgewood College’s arts building.
The building itself is modern and magnificent, with a winding staircase visible through a clear glass front. I hoist my bag out of the passenger seat and wheel it into the building. I rush past the sculptures and artwork and take the elevator to the second floor and room 202, where I spend most days.
Some days I feel a little self-conscious — my invisible disabilities (I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome) mean I sometimes use elevators, a rolly-pack, and the accessible parking spot. But once I get to room 202, the main classroom for the art therapy department adjacent to the office of its supervising professor, Molly Tomony, I tend to relax. It’s a small department, one where we all know each other by name. We filter in and out of Molly’s office and classroom like worker bees around a queen, heading in and out to classes on painting, lifespan development, ceramics, and psychotherapies.
I’d spent my life doing art — everything from doodling around notebook edges to painting swirling abstract acrylics. When life got dark in my 30s and early 40s, art therapy pulled me through an eating disorder, substance use issues and the devastating death of my partner. I knew the power of art, and I knew I needed to find a way to bring that light to the surface for others. Edgewood came into sharp focus as one of the few undergraduate art therapy programs in the Midwest.
Thanks to COVID, my first full year at Edgewood was completed through a “high-flex” format: Classes were offered live and online simultaneously, and both the students and the professors had the choice to attend in either format. This made for some interesting learning. In some classes, teachers lectured from their kitchen, dogs and children dashing through the background, while masked students sat six feet apart in a campus classroom. Likewise, some teachers were on campus lecturing to a screen full of tiny students in squares.
In a way, I was grateful for the high-flex model. As a returning non-traditional student, I was frankly, well...terrified. I was transferring from Madison College, where I’d been taking a class here and there for years, and had also been enrolled at UW-Madison as a single mom in my 30s, so I was no stranger to school. Yet entering Edgewood at 49 felt very different from Madison College, where half the students were non-trads, and from the UW, when I’d still felt young enough to claim some element of cool. This time, I felt old.
It didn’t help that my daughter was enrolling in college at the same time. Our family friends half-joked that we could hang out at cafes and pull all-nighters together. I would cringe inside, thinking of how the last time I had gone without sleep for 24 hours, I was ready to bring down nuclear apocalypse on anyone who mildly irritated me. We would not be pulling any all-nighters.
As it turned out, I was not the only non-traditional student at Edgewood; there were many of us. And I began to observe a funny phenomenon among us. We weren’t afraid to talk in class. I can’t pinpoint the exact cause: maybe because we’re peers of, if not older than, the teachers. Or maybe it’s the lifetime of experience to draw on for answers to questions. Or maybe it’s simply that we’re more likely to have done the homework than, say, a freshman.
Whatever the reason, it turns out many non-traditional students are the ones who speak up first and answer the most questions. As a result, we bring a depth of knowledge to the table that young people just entering college may not have. Understanding that, and easing into Edgewood on the high-flex model, made me understand that there was nothing to be terrified of.
This August, Edgewood returned to in-person instruction. I was again nervous: it meant longer days on campus, a challenge for me. But I dove into a very full semester. So far, meeting people beyond the tiny boxes on the screen has been mostly positive. I’ve only felt embarrassed or out of place maybe 20 percent of the time. And I quickly found my niche among the occupants of room 202.
Returning to school has been one of the most positive experiences of my mid-life. It’s given me a new faith in the next generation, who impress the heck out of me at every turn. We’re in good hands, folks.
Yet returning to college in mid-life is not for the faint of heart. The hours are crappy, and the pay is terrible. Having to squint at a computer screen six hours a day doing homework is hard, even with bifocals. I drink way more caffeine than I should, and I live on protein bars scarfed down in between classes.
But I wouldn’t take back this decision for anything. Art therapy is opening up new doors, new worlds, for me. I am thriving, and my mind is a sponge for learning in a way that it never was when I was younger. Someday this education will enable me to bring some small bit of healing into the world, and that makes every early morning and late night worth it. But I still draw the line at all-nighters. I need my beauty rest. n
Rene Livingston-DeTienne, a poet, freelance writer, and full-time student, lives on Madison’s east side with her spouse, daughter, and four unruly little dogs.
If you are interested in writing a personal essay for Isthmus, please query lindaf@isthmus.com.
