@SeekingHope , I’m sorry if you feel invalidated or misunderstood because of the reactions you’ve received here. There is a lot of nuance to work through in sorting all of this out. IMHO, most of the wisdom that’s worth gaining in life comes from the understanding that two truths that seem to be in conflict are, in fact, both true; and in fact one cannot arrive at a complete understanding without acknowledging both truths and navigating the tension between them.
What I mean by this, in your specific situation, is that your feelings aren’t wrong, but the challenges to your perspective that people have offered here aren’t wrong either. The path through this is to arrive at the understanding that can only be gained by working through the way in which those perspectives collide.
What is true is that you are missing something that you need and value in your life, something that you wish you had gained earlier through your college experience.
What is not true is the way in which you have inextricably linked that missing element, in your mind, with an extremely specific vision of an experience you missed out on. (A vision based on the reminiscences of someone in a different generation, such that his exact experience does not exist today, in addition to the fact that it’s been idealized in his memory before being passed on to you.) If you can’t deconstruct this fixation, you are on a path to a life in which nothing good that comes to you will ever measure up to the fictional dream in your mind.
I know a person who had a choice between two top-20 universities. He chose the one he thought was the best fit, but soon reached the conclusion that the other would have been better. He proceeded to spend four years at the school he chose, and several years since, complaining at every turn about how this misstep has ruined his life. Mind you, he will never know whether he really would have been happier at School B. It is entirely possible that in that alternate universe, he would still have spent his life catastrophizing about having missed out on School A. He will never know, and neither will anybody else… but what is clear to everone but him is that he has reached the point of poisoning his own experience with his commitment to negativity. He has lost many friendships because people just can’t take the constant complaining for which there is no solution. Every time a friendship falls apart, he sees it as further evidence that his peers at School A are just terrible people and everything would have been different at School B. Thus, his unhappiness has evolved into a dystopian self-fulfilling prophecy of epic proportions. He has had a top-notch education and has a good job, excellent grad school prospects, and a bright future by any objective measure, but he can’t let go of the Road Not Taken and seems determined to be miserable. So many friends have tried to talk him down and the attempt just ends up blowing up the friendship and being added to the litany of “See what terrible people go to School A?”
The above situation is different from yours, and yet it isn’t. You are 28, with your whole life ahead of you. You have a choice between making something of the timeline you are actually living in, or remaining stuck in your refusal to let go of an alternate universe that is not your life. Sure, you can try to jump the tracks and insert yourself into that alternate universe. But here’s the problem - you have so built up what you wanted and expected from that universe that even if you get there, it will not live up to those expectations. It can’t. You have a huge unmet need in your life, and you’re imagining that a particular school, a particular fraternity filled with particular people, will fill that hole like the perfect puzzle piece snapping into place. That doesn’t exist, though. People and institutions will disappoint you. In fact, the very intensity of your unhappiness and your need and your expectations will end up tanking the relationships and the “brotherhood” of which you dream.
That doesn’t mean that there is no hope. What it means is that you need to take your perspective on what you need to a higher level of abstraction. Not, “My life will only be worthwhile if I become part of a fraternity,” but, “I have a deep need for a level of human connectedness that I haven’t experienced yet.” There are many ways to get there, but if you don’t let go of the excessively-specific dream, you will end up rejecting the very opportunities that could make you happy, because they don’t, on the surface, match the dream. Plus, this level of focus on meeting such a specific, long-denied need takes up so much emotional space that you won’t be able to be your best self and enter new situations with openness to what you can give to others - and being able to offer your own gifts and positive energy is an essential component of the connectedness that you’re looking for.
The bottom line is this; if you can’t let go of the dream, your misery will poison the well of every new situation, and you will always feel as if it was the wrong situation when it was really the poison you brought to it that made it wrong. If you can let go of the dream and make a fresh start on building a positive future, the letting-go will open up the space for whatever is next in your life to surprise you by becoming the dream, and giving you what you are seeking in ways that you can’t currently imagine.
Does that mean that you shouldn’t go back to college? Not necessarily… but no decision you make from a distorted mindset, with unrealistic expectations, is going to work out well. For the sake of your future happiness, you really must do the work of adjusting your perspective and your expectations first. Letting go hurts, but not as much as the rest of your life is going to hurt if you don’t work through the pain of letting go first. It’s hard, but there is unlimited potential on the other side.
Really, there are so many possibilities. If you have saved up enough money to go back for another whole undergrad degree in film, what else might you do with that money? What values are important to you? Maybe you could find a project you believe in, somewhere/anywhere in the world, that would welcome you as a self-funded team member dedicated to filming and documenting the work they are doing? There’s no brotherhood/bond like that of a common purpose and shared vision.
That’s just one random brainstorm - YMMV - but my point is that there are many roads to take in life. We all have roads not taken - but no good comes from remaining stuck on those when there are so many on which we can go forward.