I found my GED study book at a thrift store two weeks after moving into the shelter. It was dog-eared and had someone’s coffee ring on the cover, and I almost put it back because it felt like a sign of failure. But I kept it. I needed something to do at night when the hallway was quiet and I couldn’t sleep.
I was twenty-three, and I had just left the house I’d grown up in. My mom had stopped paying attention to anything by the time I was fifteen—not just to my homework, but to whether there was food, whether I was going to class, whether I existed. I stayed because it was the only roof I knew, but eventually the roof stopped being enough. I walked out with a backpack and a hundred dollars I’d saved from bagging groceries.
The shelter had a small computer corner with two old desktops. Nobody used them much. I started sitting there after dinner, opening the GED study guide and working through math sections I hadn’t touched since sophomore year. I remembered more than I expected, which surprised me. What didn’t surprise me was how anxious I felt every time I turned a page. That feeling of waiting for someone to tell me I was doing it wrong—that stayed.
A caseworker named Dana noticed me there one night. She wasn’t the warm type, but she was practical. She handed me a library card and said, “The GED practice test is free online. Use it before you waste time on book chapters you already know.” That was the first useful parenting advice I ever got, even though it wasn’t from a parent. It was from someone who treated me like I was capable of figuring out what I needed.
So that’s what I did. I took the practice test and found out I was weakest in reasoning through language arts—which made sense. I’d spent years reading the same paragraphs over and over, trying to find hidden threats in ordinary words. My brain had been trained to look for what wasn’t said. The GED wanted me to identify the main idea. Those are different skills.
I passed the real test six months later. It wasn’t dramatic. I walked into a testing center, sat in a cubicle, and filled in bubbles. When the screen showed my score, I felt less like celebrating and more like a knot in my chest had loosened slightly. Then I walked outside and stood on the sidewalk, not knowing what to do with my hands.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: after the GED, I felt worse for a while. I’d been working toward this one goal, and now that it was gone, I had to face the bigger question—what next. And I had a strange answer that I was almost embarrassed to say out loud: astronomy.
It started when I was a kid, actually. My elementary school had a planetarium dome that was just a dark inflatable tent they set up in the gym twice a year. I remember lying on the cold floor while a volunteer pointed a laser at the stars projected on the ceiling. I didn’t know any constellations. I just liked how small I felt up there. Like all my problems were down here, and the sky didn’t care about them.
I didn’t tell anyone at the shelter about the astronomy thing. It felt impractical. People at the shelter talked about getting jobs, getting housing, getting documents sorted out. Nobody talked about the universe. I kept it to myself until I met an older guy at the bus stop who wore a NASA hoodie. I asked him if he worked there. He laughed and said no, he was a mechanic. But he liked the night sky. He told me to check out free online lectures from a university that had a program on planetary science. “You don’t need to be a student to listen,” he said.
I listened to a lecture on exoplanets while folding laundry in the shelter laundry room. The professor spoke slowly, and I didn’t understand half of it. But I learned something important: astronomy isn’t just looking at pretty pictures. It’s math, physics, coding, and tons of writing for grant proposals. That should have discouraged me. It didn’t. It made me realize that my GED was just the entry ticket, not the whole ride.
Now I’m taking community college classes at night. I’m enrolled in a basic algebra course and an intro astronomy course for non-majors. The astronomy class is more about concepts than computations, but the teacher—Ms. Otero—keeps slipping in real problems from her research. Last week she showed us how to calculate the distance to a nearby star using parallax. I was lost. I raised my hand and asked her to go over it again, and she did, without sighing or making me feel dumb.
That moment—asking for help and receiving it without shame—is something I didn’t know how to do before. At home, asking was a risk. It meant you needed something, and needing something meant you’d be disappointed or ignored. I’m still learning to unlearn that. In class, I’ve started saying “I don’t get this yet” instead of just quietly panicking.
For parents or teachers reading this, I think there’s something important here that I didn’t fully appreciate until I was on the other side: the kids who seem distant or who fall behind may not be uninterested. They might be exhausted from navigating a home life where no one asks about their homework because no one asks about their day. You don’t need to fix their home situation to help. You just need to offer a concrete path forward, like Dana did with the library card, or like Ms. Otero does when she says “try it again, you’re close.”
I’m not close to an astronomy career. I don’t even have a solid plan. I know the typical path goes: bachelor’s degree, maybe a master’s, maybe years of research or observatory work. But I also know that there are telescope operators, lab assistants, science writers, and educational program coordinators who never become full professors. Some of those roles can start with an associate’s degree and a willingness to learn software. I’ve been looking at a local observatory that has a volunteer night program. I haven’t called yet. I keep telling myself I’ll call when I finish this semester.
The GED was the part with a definite end. Now I’m in a part that doesn’t have an end, and that’s okay. Some nights I still sit in the shared kitchen on campus, watching the stars through the window while my algebra book sits unopened. I’m not searching for answers in them anymore. I’m just noticing that they’re there, and that I’m here, and that both things can be true at once.
I don’t know if I’ll ever work in astronomy. But I’ve learned that wanting something isn’t the same as having a plan, and having a plan isn’t the same as having a life. Right now I have a library card, a GED certificate, a night class, and a bus pass. That’s a start. I’ll figure out the rest once I stop being afraid of asking.
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