By the time this article goes live, it’ll have been about three weeks since I graduated from Rhode Island College. To say that I’m proud of this accomplishment is an understatement. Not only am I the first in my family to go to college and get a degree, I did it while working anywhere from two to four jobs, volunteering, and writing weekly articles.
It wasn’t easy, but I packed in my schedule and I prospered. I’m confident in myself and my abilities as an academic, and I’m excited to see what the future holds for me now, post-grad.
But in the same breath, I’m afraid life post-grad will be full of impromptu time management lessons.
In the past three weeks, I’ve lost all sense of time and space. Albeit, I’ve also been struggling with a major depressive episode which definitely does not help. But still, I should at least have an idea of what day of the week it is, right?
I’ve lost track of deadlines, of work commitments, of packing for my move to Maryland. I’m all over the place. I don’t like feeling like I have no direction, like I’m just floating and without the jam-packed schedule that I’ve grown so used to, that’s exactly what my days have become.
I know I can’t be the only one struggling with this. Life post-graduation is a huge adjustment, one that I honestly wasn’t prepared for. I spent so much time focusing on getting to May 12th, on crossing that stage, that I didn’t bother to think about what May 13th, or 14th or 15th would look like. Now I’m paying for that.
But I know that I’ll figure it out. Everyone struggling with this adjustment will. I mean hey, we didn’t get degrees for nothing, right? Somebody in this world felt we were well-educated, well-rounded people—somebody believes we’re capable of figuring this world, and our place in it, out on our own. Now that we’re out of school, that somebody should be us.
