You're an adult now. Though, you suppose that you have been one for a while. Somehow adulthood didn't seem daunting four years back when Mommy and Daddy dropped you off at the dorms. Because that was all so temporary — doing your own laundry and cooking your own dinner. You became your own alarm clock, the freedom of life sans curfew juxtaposed with the 8 a.m. classes your father "encouraged" you to take. Declaring the major you know will make your parents happy, you worked to become the audiologist or prosecutor or stock broker that they bred you to be. Sure, you wanted to study dance, but you did the right thing — the practicality your mother beat into your head superseding any desire that you might have.

You think to yourself that college wasn't as bad as you'd been told. Your parents gave you money so you wouldn't have to work, and if you were late to class a few times, there was no penalty. You get to know your roommate, a theater major with a million and one dreams. She's the type of person your mother would disapprove of for her lack of motivation, but you try not to pass judgement as she goes to parties every weekend and to rehearsal with a smile on her face, while you envy the happiness that you left at high school's doors. At the end of the day, it's fine. You have four years to figure yourself out.

You're an adult now. This becomes more apparent. You suddenly relate to those Facebook memes about broke college students and learn several interesting ways to cook ramen. The coursework gets more tedious and the weaker students are weeded out. Of course, you never were, because you were always such a motivated student. The readings and papers are nothing compared to the hours spent trying to impress your peers. You went to rush week and the sorority you like didn't bid on you. Model UN and working on the newspaper takes more of your time than you thought it would. Your mother tells you to buck up as you cry to her, then asks you about your grades. For the first time in your life, your GPA falters as you realize that it's getting harder to keep up with it all. But you've always been the one with too much on her plate; your ambition exceeding the width of your proverbial stomach. The days that you'll be late to class, you don't bother going at all. The semesters are long and there's no attendance policy; you have time to figure it out.

"You're an adult now," your adviser says in the stern voice you equate with your father, the same one who will scold you for getting a C in your "Writing about British Literature" course. From there, your grades decline like academic dominoes, taking the rest of your averages down with them. Tomorrow is the night you'll study, you say. I'll do this paper early and start studying for that test. But tomorrow never comes. The ambition you have at four in the morning gone when you wake up a few hours later. Club activities fall to the side and soon enough you stop going altogether. They were fun for a while, and you'll miss hanging out with your friends, but your major coursework needs to be priority No. 1, though you don't know why you bother anymore.

At one point, working towards your career made you happy, but the deeper you fell into your textbooks, the more droll the process seemed to be. The only class you bother to work for is your dance elective and you think to yourself, This is what I want to do. But the real world waits for you outside those doors. The real world, with theorems and taxation laws and different psychiatric disorders. You wish you could be like your friends in the major — the ones who seem to love what they do, passion excreting from every orifice of their bodies — but you, instead, drown in stress, because it's all you can do to keep up with expectations.

You're an adult. Now, you see that. Four years and many sleepless nights later, you're handed a degree you earned by the skin of your teeth, your GPA decent, but not good enough for the school you planned to attend for your master's. You graduated without honors, a fact your mother won't let you forget. The diploma hits your hand, and everything hits you all at once: income, work, spending your days wallowing in a career you could barely stand to read about and now have to perform.

The questions that you thought you'd have so much time to answer now linger at the end of your tongue like the booze you never got to drink at parties because you didn't get the chance to go to any, shut into the notebooks of the courses that couldn't teach you to be smarter. But your time is up, slipping away while your nose was crammed in a book. The words on your certificate are just ink on a dead tree — they can't predict your jobless future, they don't tell you who you are. Because for the last four years, you lost yourself, caving into the pressure you were put under to do what you had to, and you realize all at once, that this isn't what you wanted to do, and it never was.

Later that night at a party, you see your old roommate, the ex-theater major. She tells you that she's moving to New York in the fall, teaching for now, her sights set on Broadway. Your friends from your major gush about the law firm or their residency or the number of wonderful corporate things they'll go on to do. You realize they are both one in the same — lawyer or actress -- because they were happy because they did what they wanted.

You know that you didn't. You've known for some time. "But I'm an adult now," you think, "that choice was mine."