I'm jealous of college students who move into dorms with their parents' help. My migrant parents were never interested in college for me.

• My parents grew up as migrant farmworkers and had little experience with college.
• With no emotional or financial support, I didn't graduate from college until I was in my 30s.
• I've finally framed my degree, and I'm learning to celebrate my achievement on my own.

Annual move-in days on college campuses across New York City have always left me in a funk.

When I lived in uptown Manhattan, I had to endure the street closings near Columbia University. Whenever I went down below 14th Street, I faced the cheerful NYU volunteers, wearing purple T-shirts that read "Welcome Ambassadors" and directing frazzled parents unloading the family SUV.

These days, I'm living down in the financial district, so I contend with the double-parked vans from which someone's sweaty dad single-handedly carries a mattress down the street and into one of the many Pace University dorm buildings.

Witnessing this annual migratory phenomenon leaves me melancholy because it's a stark contrast with the long and lonely journey through college that I navigated alone.

I'm a Mexican American kid from the US-Mexico border

My family didn't have a tradition of going to college; my parents were first-generation migrant workers. My dad dropped out of the ninth grade so he could enlist in the Army and escape the harsh labor of working the land. My mom was pulled out of school in the fifth grade and put to work in the cotton fields to help with the family finances. Her immigrant mom had a chronic illness, and the extra money my mom made helped pay the medical bills.

I was sensitive to what my parents had suffered and didn't want to add to their burdens. With our family struggles, I knew I had to figure out the college thing on my own. And I did — sort of.

I was accepted into the US Military Academy at West Point

I accepted an offer to enroll at West Point because the school gave each student a full ride. But I didn't calculate the high personal and emotional cost of being there.

Countless other new cadets arrived without their parents, but as a person of color who still hadn't come to terms with his sexuality, I felt especially alone. I also wasn't prepared for the trip home during Christmas break, when I found out that my mom sold everything I had left in my room. She gave away all of my civilian clothes and every trophy I'd earned at the speech and drama tournaments throughout high school. I had to buy new clothes just to get through the holiday.

Before the academic year was done, I dropped out of the academy.

I spent the next decade getting into — and then dropping out of — one college after another

I never had the financial resources and emotional support required to finish a degree.

Some years I didn't even start school. I had to forfeit an acceptance to Columbia because I didn't have the money for the tuition deposit. When I got accepted to NYU a few years later, I deferred matriculation until I could find the money. It never arrived. Each time, financial-aid officers pressed me to take out school loans, but I refused because I didn't want the debt.

The bigger problem, I now think, was that I never asked for help. Why did I think a teenager — or even someone in their early 20s — had to figure it all out himself?

The year I turned 30, I applied to a small liberal-arts college downtown

I was accepted into a small school. I finally took out a dreaded student loan to make up the balance of the high-priced tuition not covered by the partial scholarship I'd received. Years later, I graduated a decade "late" — 10 years older than most of my fellow classmates.

My family didn't show up for graduation.

Earlier this year, as graduation season echoed across the country with the pop of Champagne corks and confetti cannons, I was back home in Texas visiting my mom, and I asked her where she'd put my college diploma. I had expected her to have it displayed on a wall somewhere, but she pulled it out from under a pile of domestic clutter, still in the heavy cardboard mailer that the school had sent it in 20 years earlier.

"I'm taking this back," I said, shoving the document into my suitcase.

As college dorms reopened in New York this month, I decided to frame my diploma

I live with my partner now. We went to the same school at the same time but didn't meet until five years after graduation. I asked him whether he would be interested in framing our diplomas and hanging them in our house. He agreed.

Instead of feeling bad about the long and lonely road it took to get my education — and the 20 years it took to pay off the school loan — I realized that, in my emotional exhaustion, I'd forgotten what I'd accomplished. I could literally reframe the experience as a testament to tenacity and not giving up on myself.

I did that.

And rather than getting caught up in my feelings about college move-in day yet again, I'm determined to move on. Now, every morning when I sit down to work in a nook of our apartment, I glance at our diplomas on the wall as the sun comes up and blazes on the downtown buildings.

Maybe next year, in the spring, I'll throw myself that graduation party I never got.