Ruby Miyasato

Student

“I felt so inept and depressed. My life was going downhill quickly, and school was the only refuge I had left.”

For Ruby Miyasato, a lifetime of frustration reached a low point when she was 35. “I had spent my whole life until then thinking I was stupid, and it finally got to the point where I was afraid to leave the house. My whole professional life, I’d been hitting my head against walls. I couldn’t hold a job, and I felt I was less than everyone around me. I just couldn’t understand why I couldn’t understand.” Then, grasping for something to give her life stability, Ruby arrived at SMC. And life began to brighten.

“I literally feel as though I’m coming out of a fog,” she explains. “When I got here, someone sent me to the Learning Disability Program, and when I explained my fears, they tested me.” The results of that test confirmed attention deficit disorder. “What that means is that my brain tries to decipher involved conversations or lectures more or less at random,” says Ruby. “The result is that I have ‘holes’ in my information. I had been deathly afraid of going back to school,” she continues. “But you cannot imagine what a relief it was to discover what was wrong, to give it a name, and know that there were many practical things I can do to correct it.”

Ruby is working “slowly but surely to integrate the new skills I’ve learned into my personal, academic, and professional life. I plan on getting a masters in Women’s Studies and then work with Latina women. And I approach all that I’m doing on campus now as though it were practice for what I’ll be doing later in the ‘real world.’” A world that, for Ruby, now looks a great deal more welcoming.

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