POST-GRAD BLUES: What no one tells you about graduating university.

This is the first fall in nearly twenty years of my life that I will not be returning to school.

Ahhh, graduation. The moment we, as students, have waited our entire educated lives for. The achievement that is supposed to make all those years of sleepless nights, anxious test preparations, embarrassing acne breakouts and playground bullies seem like they served their purpose.

While everyone around me seemed to be jumping for joy at the fact that they no longer had to spend a second studying for an 8 AM class they didn’t want to take or eat that nasty ass cafeteria food, I seemed to be the only one in my graduating class who felt incredibly unsettled at this looming void that now laid ahead of me. I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of existential dread, one that has not left me for months.

Although I got incredibly lucky and landed a post-grad job with a company and in a field that I love (my first day was actually the day after I handed in my final paper, talk about a great distraction) I can’t help but be followed by a sense of fear since walking across that stage over the very … real stage of life that I seem to be in now.

With school I had a role. I knew that no matter what was going on in my life, I could depend on returning to school in the fall. Yeah, school made me incredibly anxious. It triggered all of my perfectionist tendencies and I would have rather been somewhere else the majority of the time I was there - but at least it was a certainty I could depend on. It was a next step that the world had laid out for me and there was a comfort in knowing that all I had to do was follow the path. For someone with chronic anxiety and a desire to be in control, it’s unsettling to not have invisible external guidelines to follow. The lack of control over my lifes direction now triggers past coping mechanisms where my brain has decided it can find that sense of control (cue, eating disorder..).

It doesn’t help that since graduating I seem to be constantly surrounded with headlines teaching me “How to get your post-grad dream job!,” “How to start saving for retirement!,” “How to buy your first house!”… the list goes on.

In school, we prepare to pass, advance, graduate. In life, we prepare to make it to the weekend, to the vacation, to retirement. As a society we live for the ‘future’ life, not the current one (the one that actually exists).

How am I supposed to enjoy the now when the now is supposed to be spent preparing, improving, accomplishing?

I would also like to acknowledge that yes, I am aware that this is an incredibly first world problem. To have been lucky enough to have lived in a country where I received an education my whole life is not something that a large majority of the world can say they've experienced, and I truly was so grateful for my education the entire time I was enrolled. I definitely recognize the privilege I have to have been in school for nearly twenty years. I can also acknowledge the privilege of having this sense of anxious freedom to ‘figure out’ what I would like to do with my life now.

And I can also acknowledge that I have not a fucking clue.

What I do know is that this season of life is teaching me to not wait until I have the achievement, the diploma, the promotion, before I allow myself to be happy. I am learning that life is happening everyday in front of me: in the seemingly mundane drive to and from work, in the boring meals I share with my family, in the silly conversations I have with coworkers.

It is teaching me to bask in the beauty of the here and now. The future is going to happen regardless of if I panic about it, plan for it, or not. It’s good to have an end goal, like graduation to strive for, sure, but remember that moments like those are such minuscule blinks of your existence here. It is in the smaller moments that life happens, that life is happening, and I don’t want to get to the end of my life and realize that I didn’t allow myself to appreciate the beauty of the ongoing, messy middle. Those are the moments that life is made up of.

Even the stress and anxiety that I am experiencing in this post-grad phase of life is beautiful, because it means that I am alive, and that I have experienced something so big and beautiful that it makes me sad it is over.

I would love to know how you have navigated a transition period of your life, and how you dealt with the uncomfortableness of the unknown.

Further resources on this topic that you may also find useful:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/smarter-living/how-to-cope-when-everything-keeps-changing.html?smid=li-share

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ted-conferences_at-some-point-you-will-find-yourself-transitioning-ugcPost-7104457129222094848-L04E?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

You got this.