College graduation: a time when you're supposed to be ready for real life, but you actually feel like a toddler who hasn't quite gotten the hang of walking properly.
Between being flooded with questions at the dinner table that sound like, "What the hell are you planning to do with your life now?" and having no idea what you're planning to do with your future, graduation can seem like a terrible thing, rather than a new chapter in your life. But whether or not you got a liberal arts degree or a chemical engineering degree, every soon-to-be college graduate struggles with the same things.
When you feel like you've been wandering through school for the past four (or five... or six) years, life has still been happening. It's easy to feel like your life won't start until you're done with school, but school has been your life and that's part of your journey. Graduation is giving you freedom more than anything, even when it feels like a trap.
The anxieties seniors go through range from debating on going another year, applying to every single internship and job even though you don't want any of them, and feeling like if you could just travel for the rest of your life everything would be OK. But those are not the underlying issues of why college seniors are almost always terrified for graduation.
It's the pressure. The pressure from everyone a decade older than you expecting greatness the day you walk across that stage. The pressure of professors and respected friends having an idea in their minds of how they think your life should go, each one of them completely different. And mostly, the pressure you put on yourself to decide what you really want to do with the rest of your life right now.
But it's important to remember that life isn't a race. Just because your business major friend found a job at a high-paying company before he graduated doesn't mean you're going to or have to. Sometimes college graduates stay at their minimum wage jobs for a while or they move back home or they quit everything and blow through their savings to travel. Until now, everyone has been on the same path as you, but even the best of friends can have their lives go in completely different directions.
And that is OK.
