Life Transitions: From High-School Dropout to Ph.D.
Christy Moore Was on the Brink of Ruin—Until the Unthinkable Redirected Her Life
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Everyone agrees we’re in a massive transition, but few agree on the best way to navigate it. Every Wednesday at The Nonlinear Life, we focus on life transitions. Today we begin a new feature: A portrait of a nonlinear life well-lived, from the 400 life story interviews I’ve conducted since 2017.
To kick off this occasional series, one of my favorite stories of all.
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Christy Moore always hated school. “In kindergarten, I would pretend to vomit at the bus stop so I didn’t have to go.” When her mother made her get on the bus, “I’d just make myself sick at school so she’d have to come and get me.”
A tomboy, Christy had no interest in girly things; by high school she was a rebel. “I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I just knew I didn’t enjoy learning.” She started dating a football player; they played hooky and hung out at the beach. Then, the summer after her junior year, she became pregnant.
“I told Roy upfront, ‘I’m having the baby,’” she said of her boyfriend. “‘If you’re gonna be in our lives, I’ll keep it. If not, I’ll put it up for adoption.” Roy was offended; of course he would stick around.
Six weeks later, they were married. He dropped out of college and got a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken; she dropped out of high school. They lived in a duplex.
“I thought this not only ruins our lives, this completely changes the trajectory of our lives,” she said.
In the next eight years, Christy and Roy had three children. He worked multiple jobs in fast food; she took a paper route from three to six in the morning. They had to switch from the Methodist church to the Baptist church because her old community shunned her. They eventually scraped up enough credit to buy a small Japanese restaurant in a strip mall on Wilmington Island, Georgia. But Roy needed multiple surgeries for ulcerative colitis and was out of work for months, tumbling them into debt. “We were that typical family with 2.5 kids and one paycheck away from being homeless. We needed security.”
Christy and Roy
Then something unthinkable happened.
Christy used to take her daughter to the public library for toddler time. One day the kids went off to do arts and crafts, and Christy, pregnant with her second child, plopped down in the nearest comfy chair. Unable to move, she reached over and grabbed the only book she could reach. It was Wuthering Heights. “I didn’t understand half of what I read, so I had to read it twice.” When she finished, she went on to the next book, To Kill a Mockingbird. “That book changed my life,” she said. “To this day, I read it every year. I start on Thanksgiving night and read it slowly through Christmas Eve.”
Christy slowly made her way through the entire shelf of classics—Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick. And it was there, in that chair, on that shelf, that she found the answer she and Roy had been looking for. She would go back to school. She would turn to the one thing she always hated as a child—education.
"One does not like breathing," a quote from To Kill a Mockingbird Christy had tattooed
On the day she dropped her third child at preschool, Christy drove straight to Armstrong Atlantic State University. “I cried the entire way. What have I done? I’m a stay-at-home mom. I sat through my first class, in psychology, and thought, I have no idea what this man is talking about. All the eighteen-year-olds obviously knew because they were shaking their heads and taking notes. I went back to my car and started crying. You’re a high school dropout. You’re not smart enough.”
But she went to the next class. Every day she would drop her youngest off, then drive to school. “I would pray to God: ‘I don’t know if I can do this, just put the information in my head.’” She survived; her grades improved. With a full load, three children, a sick husband, ballet rehearsals, and baseball games, her life was orchestrated to the second. She entered everything onto a paper calendar in different colors of ink and crammed her life into a blue L.L. Bean book bag. And she made mountains of flashcards.
“My kids just learned: At the red light, the cards would come out; when the light turned green they’d say, ‘Mo-ommm,’ and I’d put them down and drive to the next place. I even studied at Disney World.”
In four years, she earned a bachelor’s degree in respiratory therapy. Then she went on to get a master’s degree, which took three more years. Finally, after a bout of thyroid cancer, she took the biggest leap of all. She enrolled in a doctorate program in adult education.
Six years later, a full sixteen years after picking up Wuthering Heights, twenty-four years after dropping out of high school, and thirty-eight years after purposefully throwing up on the first day of kindergarten, Christy donned a tank top and shorts on a 102-degree day in August, pulled on her royal-blue cap and gown, and marched down the aisle. She had pulled off the unimaginable: She had gone from GED to Ph.D. She called it the happiest day of her life.
“Although my life is completely out of order,” she said, “if I had done it in the expected order, I wouldn’t have the husband I have, the children I have, or the life that I have, which I adore. I would have been on the corner doing drugs or toothless flipping burgers somewhere.”
Dr. Christy Moore
Instead, today she has a job counseling nontraditional students—precisely those who don’t love school—on the virtues of bucking the traditional path and continuing their education. And she considers the upside-down way she lived her life to be the greatest testament she can make to the value of finding your own life course.
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Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through my other posts.
You might enjoy reading these posts:
Week 1 in this series: Farewell to the Linear Life
Are You Facing a Tame Problem or a Wicked Problem?
Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads.
