Never stop learning

I often sit with this question: why do people stop learning? Why do they stop growing, stop at a certificate program, when they can actually continue and keep going — especially when the government has programs to help them do it?

I think sometimes people get tired. Sometimes trauma convinces them that “small” is safe. Sometimes the system teaches them to survive, not to dream. And I wonder why more people stay enslaved and lost in the system, when the door is cracked open.

But here’s what I believe with compassion, not judgment: we need more women role models who beat the odds. Women who show up and say, “Yes, you can go further than a certificate program. Yes, college is attainable. Yes, your story doesn’t end where the paperwork says it does.”

Some people will waste their entire life just staying small. Not because they’re lazy, but because no one ever showed them they could be big. No one sat across from them at a coffee shop and said, “You’re worth the challenge.”

Screw that. I am for the challenge. I’m for the adventure. I’m for the late nights studying, the Toastmasters speeches, the interviews where you walk in scared but walk out happy. That’s why I’m an Oregonian — grounded in Oregon soil, in our rain and our grit — but I’m also a world citizen. And I’m a U.S. citizen who believes in using every tool we’ve been given to rise.

Education isn’t just for the young or the privileged. It’s for the woman who was a single mom. It’s for the person who sat in a jail cell and heard the Holy Spirit. It’s for the one who got baptized with a scrunchie falling in the tub and came up new.

So if you’re reading this and you’ve stopped: start again. If you’ve settled: unsettle yourself. You’re not meant to stay small. You were made to learn, to grow, to take up space, and to show the next person that it’s possible.

Keep going. The world needs your story — not the shortened version, but the whole, educated, healed, on-fire version of you.