9 Months Since College Graduation… Now What?

Okay, so… first of all, I actually meant to do this yesterday. I’m trying to settle into an unofficial “writing approximately every two weeks” schedule on this blog, after making my great return in February to end my very long hiatus, and I fully intended to follow through on that unspoken promise to myself yesterday… except then a huge winter storm happened. Long story short, I was without electricity all day yesterday, and I’m using today to catch up on the giant to-do list I made for yesterday of which absolutely nothing got done because I couldn’t access electronics. This is what happens when all of your productivity happens on your computer. Without your computer, you can’t do any of it. I would have been a completely useless member of society 100 years ago. Except maybe not, because of the whole writing thing.

But anyway. None of that is even close to the point. The point is I completely intended to do this yesterday, and I didn’t. My apologies. At least I’m doing it now!

I also have to gear up emotionally a little bit for the post I’m about to write, but I’m going to do my very best not to get emotional here. Partly because I don’t have the time in my day today to become emotional and therefore unproductive, and also because I’m trying to approach this topic with a perspective that’s more educational for you than reflective for me. Even though I do a great deal of self-indulgent reflection on this blog (see the most recent post, and even the post before that for examples), I also want you to learn things. So here we are.

The topic I listed for today at the end of the last post was that I’d do some reflection on college now that I’ve been out for over six months. I realize now that I’ve actually been out of college for closer to a year. It was at this time a year ago that I was starting to realize how quickly graduation was approaching. Actually, this is the one-year anniversary of what I affectionately refer to as “the best week ever,” that being spring break of my senior year, when, among other things, my special interest writing brain finally found its groove for the first time in over two years.

Looking back, I actually view March of 2022 as a turning point in a lot of ways. I always considered the return from spring break as the “home stretch” of a year of college— coming back from spring break was when it started to feel like the semester was passing really quickly, and that was even more so the case during my senior year, when I was wrapping up academic stuff and doing really cool things in my college community. (Actually, on this topic, I am currently in my first week back from spring break for this current semester, so we’ll see whether the principle holds up in grad school as well.) I even felt like this in high school, to a certain extent— coming back from spring break means the semester is about to start passing by really quickly. Before you know it, it’ll be May.

But we’re about a year removed from the start of my favorite part of my favorite year of college. And I want to do some reflecting on college in general, now that I’ve been out of it for awhile.

I’ll begin with a brief story. I have a dear friend who graduated from my college one year ahead of me. As such, my senior year of college was his first year out of college, so he was “out in the real world” for a year before I got there. I remember a conversation with him midway through my own senior year, after he had been out for awhile, in which we were discussing my approaching graduation. He told me the following (I am paraphrasing): “It won’t really hit you until it’s been about six months, and then it’ll hit you hard.”

He was right.

I know that I did my fair share of reflecting on college in the immediate wake of graduation. I reported to you once I’d been out of school for about a month, and I wrote intermittently throughout the summer. I wasn’t really feeling the weight of missing college when I was writing during the summer. I only vaguely alluded to it when I came back and wrote in the fall a few times. You might notice that right around the time I “went off the map” from this blog was when I hit the six-month mark from my college graduation.

Looking back, I actually don’t think that was a coincidence. I think that it’s a direct testament to the fact that my friend was right. For sure, the time leading up to and immediately after college graduation was an emotional experience, during which I was saying goodbye to a whole life I’d become very familiar with over the course of four years— but it didn’t really hit me how much I was going to miss it, until I had been away from it for awhile.

That’s where I am now. I’m in this very interesting state of recognizing that college is only four years, and I got my four, and they’re over now, and my college isn’t the place I can be anymore because it’s no longer the specific time and place for me. At the same time, I miss college. I don’t miss it in the sense that I want to go back— like I said, the time and place for me to be at college is in the past. But I miss the experiences I had while in college.

There’s also something else going on, which is very much related to my nostalgia for my college experience. Make no mistake: I loved college. I wrote, at length, on this blog about how much I loved my college, particularly in the time when I was preparing to say goodbye. But I find myself wondering, now that I’ve been out for awhile, how much more I would have loved college if I had made the best of it for the first couple of years.

I’ve told you before that I only felt I was “getting used to” college right at the point that COVID hit. I wrote a post about that, which I’ve come to link many times over the course of reflecting on my college experience, that I think really illustrates that whole idea of “you’re finally settled in, now go home” really well. I often find myself wondering how my college experience would have looked if COVID had never happened. Obviously, this is a hypothetical. COVID did happen. I made the best of my experience given COVID. But I find myself jealous of other people who have gotten or will get to experience college in its full four years, without the interruption of COVID smack in the middle of it. I find myself thinking: wow, I really loved college. Imagine how good of a time I would have had if we were never sent home.

And like I said, this is just a hypothetical. We did get sent home. But I think my “problems” in terms of inhibiting my own college experience had begun long before COVID. I made terrible use of my freshman year. When everyone else was settling in, making friends, and getting involved, I was locking myself in my room, struggling with my mental health, and refusing to put myself out there. This isn’t to say that my mental health struggles were confined to my freshman year, because, as posts on this blog will demonstrate, that is very much not the case. But I think my freshman year was a “failure” in that I let everything get in the way of “settling in” at college.

Now, you might say: Madison, let your past self off the hook! She was doing her best. And yeah, I get that. My past self probably was doing her best. But I regret the way I spent my freshman year (and the first bit of my sophomore year, although things did start getting better then) because I see it now as wasted time. COVID, which I could never have seen coming, took my sophomore year (and parts of my junior year) away from me, but I took my freshman year away from myself.

None of this can be changed, so there’s no real use dwelling on it. But I will say that when I look back on college, all of my fondest memories are from my senior year and the latter half of my junior year. This was when I was really enjoying myself. And these are the parts I miss most now.

I’ve been at this awhile, and I’m not sure if any of it is coherent. I guess this has turned out to be mostly a reflection post, rather than anything informative. I do hope it gives you an idea of where I’m at in terms of reminiscing on college, now that it’s been awhile. I’m completely certain that my friend’s warning, about the fact that it would “hit me” six months after graduation, was dead-on correct. This has absolutely contributed to my struggles with mental health this year.

In sum: I was really proud of myself at the end of my senior year of college. I felt like I had become a version of myself that it took a lot of years and a lot of effort to be. I don’t feel like that person anymore; I feel like I’ve made backward progress, like I’ve regressed. I miss the “person I was” while I was finishing college. I wish I still had that confident self-understanding. Now I feel like I’m in the real world, and I’m just muddling my way through it.

But that’s enough for today, and, like I said at the start, I don’t want to get too emotional. I’m going to sign off for now and come back in two weeks, when I’ll finally write something specific that isn’t just broadly reflecting on my own life the way I’ve been doing on this blog ad nauseam pretty much every time you hear from me.

Here’s where else you can find me.

Next Time: On the “disclosure moment” in grad school so far.