I'm scared. I lay in my bed until the early morning hours debating what I'm going to do with my life after graduation and if it's something that my parents would be proud of. The last thing that I want is to be is that one classmate that moves into their parents' basement because they sold out or got a pointless liberal arts degree.
You see, we get thrown into a brand new world at the fragile age of 18 and are forced to guess what we want to do for the rest of our lives. Let’s not forget that we need to make at least a decent amount of money to pay off those student loans that we’re about to drown in.
So you show up to the auditorium on graduation day, still not knowing how to wear that stupid cap without it constantly falling off, and for some reason, the university thinks it’s OK to throw a bunch of socially-awkward English majors in a row for five hours until the ceremony is over.
And then we’re supposed to leave behind all of our friends that we made over the past four years, while promising each other that we’ll come visit soon, even though we know it won’t happen. We lie to ourselves saying that we’ll stay close, but eventually we drift apart.
Let’s not forget the hell of moving all of your possessions down three flights of stairs, all the while your dad is cursing under his breath that he’s never helping his kid move in or out ever again, so help him God. And then you look around and see that the place that you called “home” for two years is nothing but an empty room with no character at all. You hug your old roommates, and then they’re gone too.
You sit in your car, packed to the brim with everything that you didn’t want to throw out, despite your mom’s comments saying that the lawn flamingo you stole from your neighbor’s yard is insignificant. You find yourself putting in the CD that you burned right before leaving your hometown for your freshman year because you’re purposely trying to be nostalgic. But then a Pitbull song starts and you immediately turn that garbage off. You contemplate why you ever thought any song by Pitbull was good enough to waste a perfectly good blank CD on. Yikes.
And then you drive an ungodly amount of time to a new place, a new apartment, a new job, and new friends, where you’re just expected to start over -- by yourself.
Luckily, you come back to reality, before graduation and realize that you still have a little time to figure things out. And by “things” I mean your life. And then we come to the realization that everyone has to do this at some point. We all have to grow up and some of the people who have succeeded in doing this weren’t real bright. So I guess there’s a chance that we can figure this out. And even if that's not immediately after graduation, that's all right. You're going to be all right. We're going to make it.
