Heart on my sleeve

To whom it may concern on the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

My name is Jason Stewart and I have failed your 1st year classes three years in a row. I received a letter saying that I was forever banned from ever entering High University ever again. However, I am pleased to tell you that something incredible has happened. I have had an epiphany. I have had a realisation that there is more to life than drink, women, and video games. Next year, Year Four, is when I make my mark on the world and pass all your papers with flying colours, from Anthropology to Psychology, Human Development to Writing For University Purposes. I'm asking that you give me my one chance to try again.

We all deserve a second chance, and I am falling to my knees and asking that you give me it now. You see, I want to learn about the human mind. I am entranced by it's dizzying highs and lows, it's ability to shape the material reality and to pretend that aspects of reality do not exist just so that it can live within its own fabricated paradise. I want to learn about the physiological limitations of the mind, and how psychologists have proven that the mind knows these laws yet in certain extreme situations can *transcend* and even break them. I want to learn how to teach others to become strong within their own minds and manifest it without. Most importantly, I want to learn about life.

We all live. But what makes that life incredible is that it's utterly, UTTERLY different from any other life before us. Even with people within the same neighbourhood, same education, same financial line... each and every person who shares the same sociodemographic will see the sameness and make it different. Why? How? Why does each mind posses an individuality and how does it fit seamlessly into the rest of society whilst still maintaining that uniqueness? These questions and more I want answers to, that I may further help both myself and the people around me.

I have shown up to classes and tests drunk. I freely admit that I have been both drunk and mentally addicted to being drunk. At one time I may have been an alcoholic if I'd had the courage to speak out. But I have been sober now for 3 months: the entirety of the summer break. A time, as I'm sure you would agree, when it is most likely that I would crack open a cold beer. I have resisted. I have suffered, but through that suffering I have grown both stronger and more sure of myself. I am ready to come back and finally learn.

As for the drug addiction, I can only say that I am sorry. I realise now that taking shrooms in the middle of a philosophy test will not push my brain past the banality of a physical existence into the sublime state of omniscience. I understand that the chemical processes and mental overload associated with both foreign substances and "test stress" caused uncontrolled feelings of fear and fury. I also admit that the inevitable hallucinations probably did not help either. What can I say? I'm sorry. I made a terrible mistake, and I hope that the people I injured both recovered well and passed the test.

The stealing from campus accounts I believe will never happen again. The person who stole is dead now. A weakling, afraid of confronting his addictions and pleasures and realising that they were destructive, and telling them to go away. I was controlled by them. But I have looked at those things and received professional help from both therapists and the law enforcement agencies in place in the community. They have been removed from my mind, and cleansed from my soul. I am a better man now than ever before in my life.

I believe that good things can come from my trouble of the last year. I know how to ask for help now. And I know both my limitations and my strengths. And right now my main strength is hope. Hope for the future and that I have a place in it. With those three years behind me, I can only look to the three years ahead of me where I promise you I shall receive straight A's in all the classes I attend and I will travel into the world as a paragon of everything that High University represents. I will champion Her ideals, and fight for the honour that I have bereft of Her.

All this, however, falls to you. You are the judge and jury, the executioner who can grant me clemency at this, my final hour. If you choose to let me come back to the university that I love with all my heart, you have chosen for me a future that is bright and shining, and where I can contribute to society in a way that is grand and far-reaching. If you choose to decline my re-admission to this, my home, then you have locked me out of the light, and doomed me to a life that is merely an existence.

Please, make the right decision not just for my life, but for those future lives that I might save.

Your most sincerely,
Jason Stewart.

PS: I know that this is a copy of the letter that I sent to you last year, but this time I really REALLY mean it!