In any game of cards, the hand I held was crap—and as a child of the 70's, I was sure people were right when they said I’d,

“never be nothin’ without a college degree.”

In high school, I’d lined myself up with classes from Psychology to Calculas, BASIC Programming to Theatre and competitive speaking tournaments in the midst of surviving an abusive family legacy and shell-shocking, Oprah-Worthy tragedies. As a girl living on her own through her final semester of high school, there was no help available for unacknowledged homeless teens. My mother would say I was a liar and that I left home. The truth is, she insisted, very colorfully, that I leave.

No family members attended my graduation, though they’d received my hand-addressed announcements and had been called on the phone to request their presence. Ashamed, I begrudged the revelry that swirled among my fellow graduates and wept in my jealousy of their off-to-college chatter, party plans and airy dreams of success.

The barriers to my own college degree seemed to pound the ground around me as I pecked away at it course-by-course, year-to-year between a tourist trap of a marriage, having and raising babies, working temp job after temp job to keep the heat and lights on while stealing swatches of time to chase dreams of a theatre career in between.

Somewhere in my early twenties, I just started reading. Reading what the PhD’s (whose topics interested me) would write, I read what the Master’s students were assigned, reading what the smartest people I knew had read—Maslow’s theses, Sun Tzu, Stanislavski, Andrew Carnegie, Frederick Douglass, Molière, a little Socrates, some Rumi and Hemingway. I swam around in art history books and the Nelson Atkins Museum’s private library, becoming a fresh fan of Carravagio, Sargent, and the Impressionists.

Richness in the midst of quiet poverty in assuming suburbia,

I recited Shakespeare, performed Wasserstein and was once Queen of the Ball as Ginger Grant. I learned to design and sew grand costumes, and even stood in for the makeup artist at the Lyric Opera to serve one of the most prolific female mezzo-sopranos in America. I learned legal writing and case preparation by working for a retired Secret Service Agent of the Nixon administration—and that’s the short list. A good deal of these things happened as a result of what I call my “Gump Gene.” Out of necessity, desire, or by providence, I landed in places I couldn’t have navigated toward with a written map and a compass in hand, but I learned the Truth of the Matter:

I didn’t know what I didn’t know,
and what I didn’t know didn’t matter—I could learn.

Today, with a just half a degree, I write. I’m a hired wordsmith and strategist, a philanthropist and activist. I solve problems, many times with unconventional wisdom. I am a metaphor maven with a catalog of stories and anecdotes that can bring forth tears or raucous laughter, and my advice to anyone is the same advice I give myself:

Drink in what your heart and mind are thirsty for.
Be compassionate; be a Truth seeker.

Know that the cards you’ve been dealt are just the opening deal; there are more to come, and everything depends upon how you play them—but always, even if the odds seem 1,000 to one, go all-in and place your bets on You.