Recently, I was over at a friend’s place in Lincoln, and the two of us were talking about how our lives are going to be after graduation. Just a mere two days after graduating, she starts her job with a prominent bank chain in Nebraska. We talked about our mutual best friend who is going to law school and how, when she’s a lawyer, she can hopefully cover for us if we somehow end up in a jam.
Of course, when I was asked the question of what’s next, I sheepishly said I didn’t really know what was next. As of right now, I am essentially waiting for one offer to be an English teaching assistant in Japan to materialize this summer, and I am sending my resume out to everyone and everything with a pulse, trying to kickstart my career as a journalist. She understood what I was going through. She only just got her post-graduation job a week ago; there’s a shared experience of floundering around, hoping something, hell, anything sticks. I think that I’ll have my ducks lined up sooner rather than later. I have a way of making things work.
What stuck with me the most about our conversation wasn’t the anxiety and dread of finally being forced to “grow up” out of college and contribute to a larger society. We spoke candidly about how we’re going to miss proximity to other people and how we need to learn in silence.
College as a community offers young adults the opportunity to “F around and find out.” We build new relationships and habits, pick a direction for our lives and cross our fingers hoping we don’t die. There’s a roughness to college. Despite people’s best efforts to be adults, we are very much still dumb kids. But there’s a shared community in that struggle; our teachers encourage us to try out new courses and take risks, your friends will bully you into trying to flirt with people way above your pay grade and you’ll find yourself pulling your hair out at least once a week asking the question “what am I doing here?”. It’s messy, it’s supposed to be. It’s what makes the moments of clarity so clear when you can finally see the bigger picture.
But after college, everyone you know will start faking it, that their vision is clear, their path is set and that the only thing they can learn is how to walk that line straighter. Of course, we all know that this isn’t true; behind every clean office setup at some venture capitalist firm is a 20 to 30-something living in a bachelor pad, pulling out their hair, ruining their already poor hairline, wondering when they are ever going to get it figured out.
I think part of that adult anxiety comes from the fact that most people have two moods, the clocked-in and clocked-out mode. When you’re clocked in, you’ve drank the Kool-Aid, you believe that you’re “Mr. Adult and you work at the business factory, making business for Mr. Boss.” You have to think you’re competent, that whatever you’re doing has a real meaning to it and every single one of your peers must see you present your best face forward.
But when you clock out, most of us are choosing to isolate ourselves. We’ve created bubbles of anxiety at home, we don’t give ourselves the grace and leeway to admit, I am hopelessly confused, I am doing the fakest job of all time that somehow pays the bills and I am just praying no one can see through me and notice the fact I can’t do anything of value.
Through community and candidness, we can begin to be honest with each other. No matter how old you get, or how many times we say we “have it figured out,” we want to be given the grace and space to be an idiot, to clumsily learn how to navigate everything. We can continue to be lifelong learners, but it requires admitting to others that we want to learn and we might look hopelessly incompetent as we try to figure it out. I don’t know where exactly I am going. I’d like to know, but I don’t. But what I will say is this: I am going to be the first to admit I am doing this life stuff for the first time, just like everyone else and I want to surround myself with people who feel comfortable admitting that with me, that even 60 years down the line we still are going to be piecing it all together.
