A Letter to Post-Grad Life
Post-grad life, you are difficult.
No one ever prepares you for leaving a place you have called home for four years. They talk about change and how exciting it will be. How great it will be to not have homework anymore. How much I will grow from this next season. How proud they are. But there is something about change that people always seem to timidly dance around: the difficulty of it all.
Conveniently, no one told me just how hard you would be, post-grad life.
It has only been a week and a day since I graduated from college, but I already feel a swell of emotions and difficulties crashing around inside me.
One of the things I hated most about college was the constant transition. For the past four years, I have not lived in any one housing situation for longer than 4 months. I have learned to settle into new class and work schedules as fast as possible. But I could never fully be settled in this kind of continual uprooting.
This whole season now is about readjusting to life in this space. I was away for four years and honestly, it doesn’t feel like I have a life here at home anymore. This is certainly not the home I left at the end of my senior year of high school. If there is one thing that going away to college taught me, it is that time does not stop while I am away. While I am grateful for this, I think I am fully realizing now just how much four years really changes things. Don’t get me wrong. I do not wish things were still the way they were when I graduated high school and left for college. Praise God they are not! I just wish transition could come faster, I suppose. Realizing I need to learn again how to live in this space that is supposed to be home is a strange reality to confront.
Post-grad life, you are unfair.
I have fought transitions so hard for the past four years in college and I have hated them. It was supposed to be easier this time. I was coming home. How could the place I love so much possibly go wrong?
All of my friends and family have a life here. I do not. And no one prepared me for that. They all have their routines and their normal and their realities without me. This season is causing me to question how, if at all, I fit into it all again? What is normal for everyone else is a foreign adjustment for me, and what is familiar for me (all my friends and family) is an adjustment for them, because I am home again permanently after being away for so long.
I know I can’t rush routine or normalcy, but I am already aching to be settled. This season of life is (as a dear friend helped me describe earlier) giving me whiplash. There is so much change, and it is all happening too slowly and so quickly at the same time. To say I graduated only a little over a week ago sounds insane. It feels like a lifetime ago. At the exact same time, I am still living between two houses, not fully moved into my new room, living out of a suitcase at my parents house, and working a temporary odd job to kick it all off, which I cannot believe has already been going on for a week of my life. I feel discontent. I am impatient. I want to quickly rush through this transition.
Post-grad life, you are exhausting.
Knowing that I am only a little over a week out from graduation makes all of these emotions feel so silly. I feel stupid for feeling all of this. And that is what makes this all so difficult. I should just take a chill pill and stop being so painfully Type A. Not everything has to be in place right now.
But when I try to tell myself that, I can only think of everyone around me who seems to have everything in place. Of course no one expected me to come straight out of college and have every gear perfectly grinding in the right direction from day one. Heck, I don’t even have proper bedding right now! But I thought I would be done with transition by now. I am so tired of fighting for normal. I am tired of waiting for the next season of schedules.
But I know it will all settle down and I will settle in eventually. I will move out. I will find routine. I will buy proper bedding and make a regular paycheck.
Post-grad life, you may be a different beast than I have ever encountered. But I have done this before. I can and will do this again.