After Getting My GED After a Neglectful Home: My Search for a Path Into Astronomy
The library on a Tuesday afternoon had that particular quiet that feels like a held breath. I was at a table near the windows, a yellow GED practice test spread out in front of me, and for the fifth time I looked at a question about fractions and saw nothing but a blur. The librarian—a middle-aged woman named Carol—had nothing to do with my life. She just kept refilling my water bottle and telling me to keep going. I hadn’t seen my mom in two months. That was the longest stretch since I was thirteen, and the weird part is that it didn’t feel like loss. It felt like the flu had finally broken.
Leaving the neglectful home wasn’t a dramatic door slam. It was a slow, ugly realization that no one was going to grocery shop, no one was going to sign my school forms, no one was going to notice if I didn’t come home. I was sixteen when I started sleeping on a friend’s couch. Her parents let me stay for a while, but they didn’t know what to say. I didn’t expect them to. I had almost no middle school math in my head, because from about eighth grade onward I was too busy being hungry and hiding my shoes from my mom’s occasional boyfriend to pay attention to geometry.
Getting the GED was never about being smart. It was about logistics. I didn’t have a car. The adult education center was forty minutes away by bus. I had to register with a mailing address, so I used my friend’s house. The first time I went to orientation, I sat next to a retired Army guy who was doing it for a job promotion, and I thought, “I can’t even keep my hands steady.” But I kept showing up. Carol showed me the free practice tests online. She printed copies and flagged them with sticky notes. She explained that a lot of the science and social studies questions are just reading comprehension in disguise.
The astronomy thing didn’t come from a burning passion or a telescope. It came from a documentary playing on a TV in the library lobby waiting room—something about the Mars rovers. I sat there for twenty minutes after my shift at the drugstore, watching the Martian landscape roll past, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in years: pure, unfiltered curiosity. Not “Am I allowed to want this?” just “What is that?” I started sneaking in looks at the astronomy section. I read about how light travels. I learned what an exoplanet was. I didn’t have a high school diploma, but I had questions, and those questions were as sharp as anything I’d ever held.
Here’s what I didn’t know, and what I’m still learning: how a GED leads to an astronomy career. I assumed I needed a PhD or at least a bachelor’s degree from some prestigious university, and that all of that was out of reach for someone who’d spent the last year doing Hiset practice tests in a library. It took a lot of asking around to find out that community college exists, that financial aid is a real thing, and that a GED is accepted. A lot of people didn’t tell me that. Carol didn’t know either, but she looked it up with me.
If you’re a parent or teacher reading this, here’s a concrete thing that helped me: someone just being willing to look up the next step without telling me it was a great story. Not “You’re so brave!” but “Here’s the FAFSA form. Let’s fill it out.” That was Carol. She sat with me for an entire hour while I tried to figure out which tax year my income came from—which was nothing, because I had barely worked under the table. She didn’t act like she was saving me. She just treated the form like a normal boring thing we had to get through. That’s the kind of practical help that actually moves someone forward.
Another thing that helped was figuring out that astronomy isn’t only about getting a Ph.D. I’ll never be an astrophysicist, and that’s okay. There are observatories that hire technicians. There are planetarium educators. There are data-entry roles in research labs. You can start as an assistant at a science museum. The point is, no one told me that until I started asking people who worked in those places. I emailed an astronomy professor at a state university and said, “I have a GED. Is it a waste of time to want to work with telescopes?” She wrote back one line: “No. Start at a community college and take physics.” That one line did more than any inspirational quote ever could.
The neglectful home left me with some invisible scars that still show up. When I sit in a classroom now, I get spooked by small things—a teacher standing too close, a loud voice in the hallway. But no one knows that unless I tell them. And the thing about astronomy is that it requires long stretches of quiet observation. That fits me. I like that you can look at a star for years and still only understand a little. That feels honest.
Right now, I’m enrolled in an introductory astronomy course at the community college. I still get anxious before every exam. I still check that my backpack has all my books three times. I don’t have a clear path to a job yet, and that’s still uncertain. But I’m not asking for a guarantee. I’m asking for the next course, the next form, the next small step that gets me closer to the telescopes.
If you’re an adult who knows a young person in a similar situation, the most useful thing you can do is not to make them feel like a project. Call the library. Find the GED practice tests. Look up the community college requirements. Ask them what they’re curious about, not what they want to be. When I said “astronomy,” nobody questioned whether it was realistic for someone like me. That made all the difference. Because I can handle the math being hard. I can handle the nights when I doubt myself. What I can’t handle is being dismissed before I’ve even tried.
I’m still trying. The career part is far away. But the stars are just as reachable from a city library as they are from anywhere else. You just have to look up.
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