My Current Path
By Bryan Paul
It all feels like deja vu, to be back in school-like taking a time machine back to being fifteen years old. I remember in my apartment days having dreams where I was back in high school, except I was the age I was at the time of dreaming. In my twenties I had those dreams. In my early thirties I had those dreams. At this moment, now, I am on the cusp of turning 39 (just a month and a half away) and I am at HCC-but it feels no different than high school. It all feels like I’m living one of those dreams-but I know how the story of my high school career ended and so I can’t help feeling it could all end up the exact same way.
I’m taking an introductory theater class. There is a familiar feeling sitting in the black box theater and I am reminded of my high school acting class. It was the largest class I had been in. Being in a large class like that was overwhelming, but I was learning to accept the fact that I should be taking risks. It led me to make choices despite seemingly debilitating social anxiety.
I lived in Westfield, MA with my dad. My school was Pioneer Valley Performing Arts High School. At the time, PVPA was in Hadley, MA. PVPA had open mics during lunch period every Friday, so I shared some poetry and tried stand up and MCing at one point. I ran for student council twice, but lost. People knew me and knew my name. Within the walls of school I felt noticed and could connect with people, yet everyday I took an hour long bus ride home to where I was isolated. This was one of the biggest problems of my academic life, especially when it came to socialization-all my peers lived far away from me. My comfort zone, which was school, was far away from me. Distance stood in the way of my social life.
I had been struggling with making connections and understanding social behavior before entering high school and was diagnosed with Asperger’s, but no one knew what that meant in 2001. There were no well known representations of autism spectrum disorder in popular culture. There was no Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory yet or Abed Nadir from Community.
I felt like I made progress with coming out of my shell once I had gotten to my senior year and yet none of the friends I made were within reach of me when senior year ended and we all graduated. I was left alone and isolated in Westfield. Luckily I did have one really good friend that I was still in touch with. Although he lived in Amherst, MA we kept in close touch and a few years later found an apartment that we would share as roommates, in South Hadley, MA.
My high school experience is well chronicled in a piece of fiction I wrote and self-published, titled “Orien The Arts Scholar”. This long tome is a series of short stories and novellas about a character named Orien Sage from the fantasy world of Promythica, who attends a school called Penhaven Village school for Performing and Arts.
”Orien The Arts Scholar” ends with the novella “Orien’s Jetcar Lessons”. Orien is alone in the cottage that he shares with his father, in an isolated wooded area in the town of Hilliar. School is over and Orien tries to learn to drive a jetcar and connect with his remaining friends to put on a play, but these plans fall through. This begins Orien Sage’s period as a writer and these are the closing lines:
”He had come up with an idea for another performance and he felt very positive at the prospect, because although it might take him ages to learn the skills necessary to conduct performances, it was a simple thing to script them, because all it took was dreaming. All it took was time and solitude and letting his imagination free.”
There are days when I wake up, now, in Westfield, taking a bus to HCC, taking theater and video classes I already took in high school, that I feel like it is all leading to the same place, yet there are blanks to be filled in, such as where I will be living when I move out again and how I will support myself financially. The adult that grew up and moved to South Hadley, Massachusetts became a novelist, but that didn’t pay the bills. I was self-published and didn’t have an audience. What paid the bills was working at Friendly’s and later at local bars. It got to the point that the rent was so high I could only make ends meet by working forty-plus hours a week. We were also under-staffed (which was why I could work that number of hours) and I was overworked. The job was having an affect on my mental health and I needed to quit. In the process of quitting my job and enrolling at HCC, I had to make a sacrifice and move out of my apartment, which was my happy place and not a day goes by when I don’t miss it and wish it were still there waiting for me.
There’s a poem I wrote in my late twenties that was incorporated into a one-man show I did at the old South Hadley library, that sums up my current feelings: “through a maze I walk/and I’m back here again/no way to talk/and counting to ten/on all my fingers/and loneliness lingers/around me at home/in this cage that I built/where I can’t roam”. I've been going through a creative dry spell lately because whenever I have a strong feeling or emotion I’m only reminded of poems I’ve already written. It seems like I’ve said everything I had to say. All that comes out of me now when I write is reality-reality in the form of essays like this one.
The real driving force and motivation for going to school is to network and make connections. Another reason is to get a degree and to have that on a resume-which would, hopefully, lead me to a job that better suits me. I don’t know what that job or career is though. I’m a theater major and it doesn’t feel like that could lead to a sustainable career. My inner child wanted to be a filmmaker. I already tried to be an author. To live and survive in this world you need financial means. You need to be fed and you need to be housed-but not only that, most importantly, you also need to be happy. I take care of myself and get by, but I do it all on my own. I did it before in restaurants and bars in South Hadley, but where am I going now?
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Bryan Paul
September 2025
