​"Everything I had planned my life to be from applying to Trent University to walking across the convocation stage evaporated the second this chapter of my life began, leaving a path open to explore every possibility I never even dreamed possible. I became someone little me would have looked up to."

​​

​

To be honest, I don’t really know. 

 

What comes after four hard, draining years besides a pile of debt and a sense that everywhere you step is the wrong direction? It’s a strange sort of navigation to move past everything that defined you as an adult: the transition from teenager to student to know a third unknown, unfamiliar identity. Who am I now? Who am I supposed to be?

 

What if I don’t like my degree?

 

I am the first person in my family to graduate from university. I am the first sibling to pursue post-secondary education and the first grandchild to leave home. There is no guide book on how to walk through this world, let alone ropes to lean on from anyone else who vaguely knows this feeling of displacement, that somehow I just seem to be floating through life in between my last exam and crossing that stage.

 

At times it feels surreal that I managed to finish at all. Holding down two jobs, full time studies, and living in an unaffordable city broke me out in hives more than I’d like to admit. On top of never feeling like I am never living in the moment or never doing as good as I know I could. It was hard. It was really, really hard to get to this point. I wrote years ago when I finished my first year how university was lonely. How I felt cold and lost and everywhere I went felt like the wrong place to be. To be honest, some of that never went away. Some of that I know now was undiagnosed generalized anxiety, but most of that was a pattern of self-sabotage that led me to isolate and never allow myself to engage in social circles or make new friends. 

 

I remember one lecture where I sat in my usual corner in the back of the room, low on gas and hungry, staring at the back of people’s heads silently willing someone to talk to me. That someone would turn around and confess they were just as lonely as me. Remembering how the first two years of school felt makes it hard for me to talk to family friends or cousins or anyone else who asks for advice. Mabe for their own child, themselves, or to curb the curiosity of how a hyper-independent student like myself graced through her studies supposedly unfazed by everything. 

 

To be honest, I don’t know what advice I could give without thinking of that girl in the back of the class wishing for divine intervention to cure her haunting loneliness. The past two years were black and white compared to the beginning of my degree, but it is hard to imagine I could have ever gotten to where I did without being thrown into a battle between myself and the realization that your suffering is not unique. Everyone else in that class had their own walk with post-secondary loneliness but was hiding it just as good as I was. 

 

Looking back, it’s sort of unifying to know now that everyone was just as scared as me.

 

I ask again: what if I don’t like my degree?

 

This is something I’ve been quietly asking myself as the last exam sits dusty in my Google Drive and my impending post-graduation move across the country quickly approaches. Do I like my degree? What can I do with a degree in English Literature and creative writing? Much like the tone of this piece: I am not totally sure. 

 

What I do know more than everything I have learned during my years at school is that plans rarely materialize like you had planned. If you were to say to me four years ago that I never studied abroad and took a job in a field I vowed to never enter and leave it three years later having spent the time of your life working it surrounded by the greatest people you have ever met, I don’t think I would have believed you. 

 

If you were to say I found my partner forty minutes from my childhood home and not in some far away corner of Europe where I lived out my middle school fantasy of meeting a British boy and travelling the world before I was 23, well, I think my childhood One Direction craze might be to blame for that one. 

 

Everything I had planned my life to be from applying to Trent University to walking across the convocation stage evaporated the second this chapter of my life began, leaving a path open to explore every possibility I never even dreamed possible. I became someone little me would have looked up to. Though she feels cooler with her high school band and the guitars and the pent up angst that made for arguably better taste in music, everything I wanted to be is staring back at her. 

 

That is not to say that these past four years were without struggle. Money was hard. School was hard. Balancing budding friendships and work life balance was hard. Coming to terms with mental health was even harder. I found myself distancing myself from my degree and the people in it. English is one of those disciplines where the professors—in all of their inconsistent views on literature and expectations for “subjective” essays—warped my passion for exploring stories and deeper connections to literature instead into “how can I best manipulate 1500 words into whatever suits the prof?” It cost me sort of everything. Having your own views and opinions I’ve learned can cost you grades you need to keep a scholarship. Having multiple jobs to pay for the rising cost of living can cost you your potential, too. 

 

This is all to say that I have found myself in unexpected places with the most unexpected outcomes during my time at university. More than all the essays and discussion groups and failed group assignments, what I’ve taken away with me is the lesson that if one thing isn’t working, try again. 

 

Nothing is set in stone. If you don’t like where you are, try again. Close that door and open another one. Don’t like your degree? You’re not the first person, go back again. Try again. Move to a new city, make new friends, experience life from a different perspective, take that job offer, write a book, go travel, fall in love and fall out of love: nothing is permanent. 

 

I am not the first person to not know where to go after graduation, and my anxiety is not unique: this is part of being an adult, so I’m learning. 

 

What comes next, you might ask? I have no idea, but I’m excited to find out.

​