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Walking into the 3rd North dormitories the beginning of my first term at New York University, I made myself promise to leave behind as much of ‘me’ back in Ohio as possible. Not that I only wanted to change to fit in, or to appease others, or things of that sort – I was just perpetually disappointed with education and the resulting environment up until this point and I felt that I should give it a chance.
To give some background, I grew up in and around Cleveland, Ohio – most of my years spent in the inner-city where I went first to a grade school that merged with another, and then itself eventually closed, but not until the year after I graduated. I had three really good friends all throughout these years – all of us had known each other since we were very young. In fact, my oldest friend lived just down the street from me off of East 74th.
Grade school increasingly became a difficult task from the moment that I started becoming more aware of myself – it is a hard moment to explain, but somewhere between 2nd and 3rd grade my mind kind of just ‘turned on’ and I became not only one of the top students, but continued this trend all the way throughout grade school. Admittedly, I was not trying – and I rarely put forth anything I would consider an effort in these years, but I was happy with my friends and the teachers let me be. Soon, things would begin crumbling.
My reputation for good grades and my overweight appearance soon began to warrant incredibly hurtful comments in my direction from various other students in many grades – and they always hurt, even when I was one of the big kids in 8th grade. I somehow wanted to get over that and perhaps use these attributes to get at the bargaining table of popularity in the mess which is high school.
And soon, after coercion from my parents as I was quite a subversive youth, I attended one of Ohio’s, and the nation’s, best high schools with a football legacy to boot. My somewhat cloistered academic conditions were now quickly being translated into perpetual awkwardness in the face of three-hundred some odd of Ohio’s brightest (and richest) – and here I was, a lower-middle class kid from the inner city depending on huge amounts of financial aid and sweat off the brow of both my parents just to attend, a type which is quickly becoming endangered species at this school (despite their attempts to remedy); and I had a tendency to say things which were probably borderline offensive on top of that. I think I gave my theology teacher a tick from how many eyebrows he raised at my various comments, not forgetting the establishment of my own personal Buddhist shrine in the bookcase near my desk. And then one day it just hit me. As a good student, I held the key to the essentials of the successful life, which many at my school were striving for – although I was never particularly interested in success so much as I was just anxious to get on with the real work and get out of high school. So, I decided to bide my time – and my first underhanded business transactions began. I began to write papers, and people bought them.
I kept this relatively under the hat throughout high school, but in the emergence of a new monster in my life, a form of mental illness, my personality began to crumble and I was suicidal – and I left high school a vastly different person than the person hopeful of restarting a productive social life, even willing to attain semi-popularity. Instead, I became somewhat of a freak show. So, I stopped writing. Wow, high school was so depressing.
Thus, college seemed to me the perfect opportunity to reform myself and try to participate in the social web – to a certain extent that was happening. I wanted to move far away from home to lessen the chances that some remnant of my bad experiences (that is not to say that all my high school experiences were bad, but easily about 95 percent) would not resurface in the form of connections from back home. It was hard to get away from family, for both myself and my parents, but I was willing to get through that in order to finally get a chance to get away – and I was becoming increasingly aware of how I could not.
I cannot help but freely exchange ideas; it is just something I do. Dropping a tidbit here and something that I remember from AP Euro there, and soon I was the floor guy-to-go-to for every single subject known to man. It got so ridiculous where I contemplated how people even got through high school – this was not everybody since there were some who showed restraint and were asking questions out of sincerity, but it began to cut deeper and deeper into my identity where I was soon written off as the “smart guy” and barely anything else. Hence, I made up for it by obsessively cleaning the apartment in order to compensate for lack of other notable characteristics.
If it were not for my roommates, who are my very good friends in New York City, I would have killed myself then. They supported me and held me up but, although I did not know it, I was about to experience the worst thing of my life that no one could have prevented. It was even worse than the feeling of wanting to die that I had become rather familiar with.
And like that, a similar instance to my mind just ‘turning on’ between 2nd and 3rd grade, I began to experience mania sometime in November (and perhaps earlier). My feelings of all-powerfulness were soon to drive me straight into the ground. I began to write papers again – but not like high school. I went all-out staying up for days at a time, reading whole books in mere hours, and then typing a ten page research paper right after. I did not go to class, I just worked, and kept going and going and going – and I had not even hit the peak since that would not come until December.
I wrote on so many subjects that I am nearly ashamed – when I think of the majors I did this for, I am frightened to think that doctors, lawyers, and other professions owe, quite literally for some, their entire freshman year of college to me. One day, I went through my databank of essays and counted the subjects from New York University and determined that with final papers and other various small assignments scheduled through-out a class, I should have obtained 64 - 72 credits just in my first term.
Eventually, I began to talk about December as “finals season”, anticipating it like my grandfather does March Madness. That week of finals, I stayed up five or six days in a row without even a wink of sleep and wrote about 400 pages of material for about 15 different classes on top of my own. Literally, my brain began to shut down and I imagine, like a pane of glass dropped out of a second story window, it shattered into thousands of fragments to the point where I am quite certain that I was dissociating without inducing any chemical, which I was very prone to do for quite a while during the surrounding weeks. Amazingly, the energy and drive behind my writing extravaganza was nearly 100% natural, which made it all the more disturbing – but at least 80 percent of those papers were written while I was completely stoned (i.e. not under the influence of a stimulant like cocaine, but while consuming inhuman amounts of pot). Yet, I still guaranteed a B+ or I gave money back, that is, when I accepted money as I only did if it were offered. I think except for once or twice this ‘warranty’ was not even considered – I was now a major producer of grades. But, my own were becoming self-regarded as substandard.
I did not go to class that often, and only two teachers respected that because I have a feeling they knew something was wrong. My grades suffered, but I did not even care because after that whirlwind, I was doomed to face the repercussion – as certain as Newton’s laws, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction and I faced a major depression that would last for months.
Despite this, I continued the business, keeping “the shop open” as I called it – this, in conjunction with my depression, had an interesting side effect. Paul Erdos said that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems; I was a machine turning drugs into original works after my manic episode. I dropped E a few times, once shroomed 2 or 3 days in a row (which I did not even know was possible), and had a hankering for Xanax and Adderol. Thankfully, my roommates recognized this as a serious fault and went to great lengths preventing me from obtaining these things more often than I did, but nonetheless, I had lost my mind.
Then, the second semester of ‘finals season’ was upon me and I was expected to perform – writing on subjects from pre-med to Africana studies. I was not manic, but driven by my poverty and a strong desire to alleviate depression through creating ‘faux-friendships’ with dozens of people for whom I wrote. Convincing myself that I had so many friends and was so well liked was my main goal – after all that is what I had promised myself when I walked through the doors on 3rd Ave. and 11th Street. Honestly, I did not even know what was going on, and soon I ended up in a mental hospital where I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As a result, I was ill-prepared for my finals and even skipped one which may prevent me from graduating on time.
At this point, my reputation was in a particular niche at New York University, but I was also active at Columbia – and this would soon grow in my second year. As this rolled around, I would, in all, have written for NYU, Columbia, Hofstra, Pace, Ohio Wesleyan, and Miami Ohio. They would come in bouts, and soon I began to get piled up again. To go back a little bit, during the summer of my freshman year, my parents had taken it upon themselves to get me back together after a very bad incident at friend’s house back in Ohio in early June after I had come back home – even since I left the mental hospital just that April, I was not well. Thus, the summer was riddled with therapy. And now, by the onset of that next school year in September 2005, I had fallen back into familiar habits – not drug-wise, but writing for others took up much of my time.
I dug another hole, and this time, I was intent at putting myself in it. As I was contracted to write for someone who I, regardless, hold in very high esteem and would consider a friend, I was put under tremendous pressure. One paper needed to be done in less then 48 hours after reading two rather hefty books in that time frame and another was due in about a week after reading another two books of incredibly dry material. I took it up, looking for a challenge; I found myself not up to it and I succumbed. For the first time in my life, I plagiarized – borrowing information from the internet to fill out a paper about a religious movement in early America. He turned it in and was promptly caught. I remember the phone call – he not even saying anything except to call him; I knew exactly what had happened. Soon, a mutual friend contacted me telling me the news.
My mind went into a complete haze, as I still do not clearly remember what exactly had happened. I sat at my computer desk, the very desk where I am at this moment, and began penning a note where I discussed that I felt I could not continue on with my life; I determined that I was drowning in a maelstrom flanked by a Hydra of my own creation. Thus, I began swallowing tabs of a medicine I had a few weeks earlier ceased taking, Depakote, one after another after another – until I began to get sick off of its pseudo-cake like taste and scent. At that moment, for what is the third time, my friends called and, very literally, saved my life as they demanded that I come from my apartment in Brooklyn to stay by them; they could tell by the sound of my voice that something was quite wrong.
That was when I came into their room and sat next to my friend who had heard via my other friend in this room what had happened with the last paper. Breaking down, I told him that I was not feeling well and that I had overdosed on my medication – it was suggested that I go to the emergency room immediately. I decided to wait until morning; missing work to go to my psychiatrist. I told the doctor that I had taken between 15 and 20 500mg pills, stopping only because I was called, and that I was having pain in my stomach. After being asked whether or not I wanted to go into a hospital again, I said that I did not, but had to relinquish emergency treatment for Depakote overdose. This included consuming a glass of charcoal and my eventual submission to once again perform a stint under observation at Tisch Medical Center as well as having to contend with the possibility that my liver was harmed in the process. I have since been discharged after a very rough time in the hospital.
The point that I am trying to make is that I am just one person, imagine how expansive these types of activities could be! When I got down to it, writing a paper was nothing more than a formula meant for teachers who would recognize the algorithms and give a good grade. Think, all you have to do is answer every part of the question being asked through a thesis. It is not very difficult – teachers at universities have to read sometimes hundreds of papers. It is quite like the AP tests (where graders get 90 seconds to read essays) as I estimate a teacher may look at a paper in a large class for roughly five minutes, tops. Also, you can look it up, it is possible to go online and pay someone to write a paper for you for a relatively good price, as well as there being large sources of free material. It is also very easy to write half and then “fill-in,” which was my mortal mistake and the ultimate downfall of my underground network.
Not to forget that these people aspiring to become professionals owe part of their success to another person. Remember, I wrote for a pre-med student once! Your doctor may have gotten through university doing the very same thing: relying on someone else to obtain grades so they could have a good time or even work on other areas of study – sharing the workload. I would venture to bet that most of the producers of these papers are likely in the same boat as I, underfinanced kids who aspire for social connection by seeking acceptance.
Who is to blame? There is no one; it is a specter haunting the halls of academia. A phantom because part of the expertise and reliability of those who write is that they are masters at not getting caught doing it because they are not plagiarizing, but writing original work. It was not until I came to plagiarize that my client was caught. Before that, I was guaranteeing at least a B+ for my services tapping into the psychology of the professors. If a professor were a communist, I wrote about revolution; if he or she were into Ancient Israel, I became a specialist in Canaanite and Ancient Hebrew religion – writing for an audience is very easy. That is why, in my own personal essays, I have come to abhor writing for the public – I, in fact, am writing this article more for therapy than concern. But things are beginning to change for me, there is a small kernel of hope in me that someone reading this will find this system disgusting and begin wondering what ever happened to integrity and what ever happened to honor? I can account that it no longer exists in our culture because people are so concerned about getting ahead in any venue. What have we become and what did I help create? I can only imagine how much of my transgression against academia has yet to be redeemed through penance – but getting put into a mental hospital twice for this activity to so aggravate my condition hopefully has been enough.
Posted by parliamentofpeople
at 3:27 PM EST
chillin'
sad
blue
on fire