Cue Quarter-Life Crisis (Is that a thing?)

Hey guys, it’s been a while.

Mid-January I was made aware of the opportunity to graduate with honors (something I didn’t think I could do), and since I only had to contract 2 more courses for honors in order to achieve this, I decided it would be a manageable and worthwhile pursuit. As fate would have it, things were a bit more complicated than that.  For my honors contracted courses, I ended up doing, in total, about 7-8 extra assignments between my honors courses (3 of them large projects/papers) and I also had to write an honors thesis, expanding a paper from a previous course to 10 pages and then presenting my thesis in front of the faculty for my department. On top of all that, on my honors graduation application, my cumulative GPA was about .03 short of what it needed to be in order to graduate with honors, and in order to bring it up, my semester GPA had to be about a 3.7. Additionally, I still had to manage leading a student org, engaging with my intentional community, working, volunteering, and (fragments of) a social life. [/excuses]

Sorry I didn’t have time to write, I hardly had time to sleep.

All ended well enough, though. I graduated with a medallion around my neck and a semester GPA of 3.9! And now I’m done. Forever.

Yay?

Sooo… yeah. Here I am. A grown up. Living jobless in my parent’s house. Writing a blog post.

Ok, so I just graduated. 3(ish?) weeks ago. By all reports, most people don’t have until several months after graduation. I definitely should not feel like a loser. I graduated with honors! I’ve had 2 internships and I do a lot of volunteering! I’m a hard worker!

But the fact remains: I do feel kind of like a loser. Up at school, I was told time and time again not to have a gap in my resume. And a few weeks isn’t really a gap... I’ve spent some of this time exploring different Pro Bono volunteering opportunities to keep me sharp while I look for a job. Every second I’m not employed or doing something productive with the skills I’ve spent the past four years developing feels like I’m wasting precious time in a job opportunity hourglass that’s about to run out. I know that’s not true. Everyone knows that’s not true.

There’s just so much uncertainty in my life now. For the first time in my entire life, I have no idea where I’ll be this September. I could be exactly where I want to be: in a full-time, degree-utilizing job in West Michigan. I could be thousands of miles away doing PR in New York or somewhere completely unexpected like Kansas City or something. Or I could be an unemployed 21 year old living with her parents. As someone who hates risks and uncertainty, this makes me super uncomfortable.

And I guess uncertainty in my future makes me feel like a loser? That doesn’t make much sense when you break it down.

I think part of my problem is that I’m going about this the wrong way. You know, for the first time since I can remember, my summer is completely free. I’m not working, I don’t have any school obligations; I’m completely free. I’m a 21-year old and I have a car: I can do whatever I want. As an adult, it’s time to stop seeing the future as a risk and start seeing it as an opportunity. I need to stop limiting myself, I need to take risks. If I don’t explore, if I don’t take risks, if I don’t even apply for jobs halfway across the country because I’m too afraid of what might happen, I’ll end up the same place I’ve always been.

So here goes. I’ll start small, but it’s time to stop tying myself down with fear of the unknown, and time to start embracing a world of possibility.