I came into philosophy during a time in my life when I felt very, very directionless and lost. It was a point when I was really struggling with a sense of self-identity. Any notions I did have were incredibly nebulous. I was far too used to being who I needed to be when I interacted with other people without any real clue about who I was outside of this. It was a pretty self-destructive time for me. I wound up dropping all my courses for the semester because I just couldn't take business any more. The focus of the material was too much for me. It totally missed the point of what I wanted to do with my life (not that I knew what this was).
Then one day I found myself in the library wandering the stacks. By chance I ended up in the basement in a random aisle. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I hadn't even been a regular visitor to the library, but I was searching in a larger sense I suppose. A book managed to catch my eye (maybe it was the bright sky blue binding scrunched between a whole bunch of ancient neighbors), so I plucked it out. It was a copy of Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America. The back cover made it sound interesting, about the problems of majority rule, so I checked it out along with another book similarly chosen for looking at lot neater than the rest (some essays on pragmatism I think).
When I sat down to read them, I was completely blown away by the kind of disciplined thinking the authors were able to pull off. This inspired me in a way that had seemed lost to me for a long time. I read voraciously and overnight resolved to be a philosophy major. I wanted to be able to put that kind of order to my jumble of thoughts, even as I fed on the ideas of their work. It's not really an understatement to say that I was pretty euphoric. Philosophy was a constant source of amazement to me, so much so that I even posted a few blogs trying to imitate what I saw as well as lurking in a philosophy forum for a few months.
This always seemed off to me though, in that I simply couldn't create the sort of thing that impressed me so much and, in doing so, I felt like I sometimes came off as semi-ridiculous (one night I was very aware of this I wound up detonating my myspace account where I had them all
). This eventually led me to, while being very interested in the huge variety of ideas and ways of looking at things that I got from philosophy, realizing that my ability to further or participate in philosophy was far outweighed by my interest in it. I did really enjoy sitting in the back listening to the discussions between the teacher and students who were capable that way, but I never kidded myself that I could keep up with them.