Learning Part 1

This week, I started a night course in HTML at Mohawk College, and throwing myself back into a learning environment was definitely the jolt that I expected. I've been out of school for years, aside from my stint in the military, and aside from actually taking a subject I'm interested in this time around, much of the experience is actually the same. The familiar preemption and anxiety didn't have a chance to replace the excitement of learning something new until my wife and I had already started pulling into the parking lot of the old reliable community college.
I had fooled myself into thinking that I was past all of the self-conscious admonitions that used to be my M.O. on the first day of school, but despite the fact that I am now a grown man, with a good job, beautiful wife, and fine family, supposedly free of the constraints of the public education system's social hierarchy, I found myself immediately reinstated into the mindset of awkwardness and trepidation that I exhibited internally throughout much of my educational lifetime.
Was I wearing the right clothes? Did I have the right backpack on? The right haircut? I must admit, as much as I like to think that I am past all of the involuntary self-consciousness that I developed as routine during my years at that institution of benign economic classification that will remain nameless for now, I still found myself going through that dusty checklist of personal appearance and demeanor that I thought had been left behind when I was eighteen.
Isn't it funny? All of those old defense mechanisms that we develop when we're young are always there, always floating just beneath the surface.
Waiting...
Biding their time...
Hungry for that moment when we cast away that vector of persona that we confidently develop once we are away from those forums of criticism that can only thrive in the arena of Western Culture.
Maybe these feelings are but shackles left form past lives. Maybe they are the merely the remnants of older versions of ourselves locked in a constant battle of supremacy, only highlighting our inability to commit even to our current self-images despite the lack of constant attack we were used to in our teenage years...