An Underwhelming Graduation 

It’s late winter in 2023, and I received something in the mail. I took the large manila envelope from my aunt’s hands and went to my room. I knew what it was. I should have been happy… I had worked so hard for it. It should have made me feel accomplished, but it didn’t. It felt so anticlimactic. It was the reward I had earned for a full year’s worth of work. Twelve full years of work. I had worked my entire life until this point… for what? A diploma stating that I had earned my General Educational Development (GED) It just didn’t feel celebratory. I didn’t get the graduation pictures, the special dinner, the walk down the aisle, the handshake, the moving of the tassel, or the chance to throw my cap in the air. I opened the envelope and gazed upon my diploma. My name in big letters, the name of a school I barely attended, and signatures from unknown people. There was a twinge of something in me I couldn’t place. Pride? Accomplishment? Disdain? I put my diploma back into its envelope and shoved it under my bed. It’s been two years, and I haven’t looked at it since. 

There is a lot of negative stigma that is associated with the GED. It’s often assumed that people who get the GED are delinquent high school dropouts who didn’t have the brains or the discipline to get through a ‘normal’ route of education. Often, that is absolutely not the case—it wasn’t for me, and it isn’t for the hundreds of thousands of others who study for the GED exams every year.

How I Slipped Through the Cracks 

Those who know me personally know that I am not shy about speaking my truth and talking about my past, even the darker chapters of it. By the time I was 12 years old, my life had begun to slowly crumble around me. Being the child of divorce is difficult—and when the factors surrounding the separation include infidelity and abandonment, plus untreated mental illness from all parties, it spells a recipe for destruction. Cue my teens—a messy, complicated era dripping with self-doubt, loathing, and a general disinterest in surviving. I was ushered from house to house and school to school. On the outside, according to my grades, I was doing fine. I was turning in homework and passing tests and going above and beyond, in fact, in subjects such as English and social studies. But on the inside, I was rotting; I was barely holding on. My attendance throughout elementary and middle school was very irregular.

I finally found some solid ground in high school and, again, did well for myself in terms of my education (excluding the pandemic and distance learning). Despite all the safety nets my high school provided for us in terms of getting ready for college and higher education, I felt I had been doomed with a very tumultuous home life, and I feared I would not be able to escape it to proceed to university. I was prepared to begin working straight away after high school, and when my counselor asked me, “Star, what college do you wanna go to? What are your plans after high school?” I couldn’t give a straight answer. I was just looking to survive, and education was not in the cards at that time. 

Cue another move across state lines, another set of rules and state laws, and I was hit with the devastating news that the state standards were different between the high schools. Credits were counted differently, and there were even various kinds of diplomas that didn’t mesh well with my previous high school. It didn’t help that I had just turned 19 and was barred from attending school because I was considered too old. All those years of going above and beyond in school despite the challenges at home suddenly fell down the drain within one afternoon. I would not be allowed to go back to high school. It was then and there that I had to swallow down the bile in my throat and accept the fact that I needed to get my GED. Never in my life had I thought that I would ever need to stoop so low… I am so smart, so creative. I worked hard to get where I was in high school, and even still, that wasn’t enough. To me, pursuing my GED was shameful and represented my self-worth, which amounted to pennies. I was trash and deserved the trash degree. 

What People Get Wrong About the GED

I had heard so much stigma about the GED that I was convinced of a completely untrue set of beliefs, which no one had bothered to debunk for me. I went into the local adult education program ashamed and embarrassed when I didn’t have to be. I felt like a failure. I thought that getting the GED made me less than my peers who graduated with a high school diploma. That was not true; that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The GED is seen as equivalent to the high school diploma. I have read that anywhere from 90 to 98% of colleges and employers accept the GED as a high school diploma equivalent because both are pieces of paper signed by a head educator stating that the basic groups of studies (mathematics, science, social studies, reading, and writing) have all been mastered. It is very unlikely that a college or employer would turn you down because you have one. 

It’s a myth that only delinquents and troubled kids have to get the GED. I was extremely ignorant to think such a thing—it’s a horrible stereotype that isn’t often discussed. A variety of different people get the GED for many reasons. Some couldn’t handle the stress of school, some could have been bullied out of traditional school, and others had to get jobs at a young age or take care of their loved ones. Completing the GED also makes it more likely that you continue your education—according to United States Courts, 65% of people who complete their GED education go on to college or university. Anyone at any stage of life can go back and get their GED. For further reading, I recommend Alpha Logic’s article ‘Myths and Misconceptions about the GED.

A Shift in Perspective: Success and The GED

The biggest lesson I had to learn when getting my GED was that success looks very different for everyone. Ever since I was a little girl, I had dreamed of graduating from high school, attending college, and earning multiple degrees, because I thought that was what was expected of me. My uncle, a very influential person in my life, always talked about me going to college; my teachers boasted that I would go far in my studies when I got older, and as a result, I was ecstatic to grow up and be an adult who could study whatever I wanted. 

I thought that it was simply how it had to be. So when my dream kept getting pushed back and put to the side, I was devastated, wondering why I wasn’t good enough, why life kept beating me up for trying my best, and why I couldn’t do what everyone else could. 

Naturally, I worked through this issue in therapy, and over the many sessions, whilst reflecting upon my time in school, I started to really think about the big picture. I had still gotten a diploma, I was still considered intelligent, and it said on paper that I had completed all the necessary schooling I needed to get jobs and be able to attend college in the future. Just because I had gotten it done a different way didn’t mean that I was less than. 

When I let go of the expectation of success and what that looks like, the weight was lifted off my shoulders. The pressure dissipated. It felt bittersweet. I had let go of the vision of myself as valedictorian; I had released the obsession with being perfect and exactly like everyone else. No one had gone through what I had gone through. Circumstances had simply been out of my control; there was nothing I could do to make it better, and I could not go back in time and rewrite my history. So I did something better. I decided I could embrace what I had done.

Over a year after I officially ‘graduated,’ on a cold November evening, I got on my knees on the floor and moved aside the totes under my bed. I found it at the bottom of a stack of papers. When I saw its swooping letters, I no longer thought of the losses. When I felt the cardstock, I was not dismayed at the potential of what could have been. I took my diploma to the store with me, got it fitted for a frame, and finally gave myself the credit I always deserved.