Graduating from School to Life Part 1 – The Struggle

I graduated from the University of Toronto in June 2017. For the first time in seventeen years, my life wasn’t structured around school. This made me feel liberated, nervous, excited, and scared out of my mind. I had no idea what to expect, and an overwhelming amount of options to choose from. Since graduation, my life has been a rollercoaster of feeling up, down, sideways, and backwards.

To illustrate some of how I felt during this time in my life, here’s a little something I wrote in January of 2018, seven months after I graduated:

It’s a strange time. For my generation, anyways. Some people my age found jobs right out of university/college, jobs that seem cool and hip and fun. Others have somehow found the means to settle down, move in with their significant others, and some have even gotten married, bought a house, and had kids. These millennials, the ones with blooming careers and engagement rings, are the ones who seem to have it all figured out. They are thriving in adult life.

And then there are the rest of us. Some are still in school for another year or two or five or ten. Some are taking time off to travel and just live life, with some lingering thoughts of going back to school eventually. Some decided that after working so hard for so many years, they needed a break to recharge and take time for themselves. But suddenly, they’ve been recharging for seven months, with no idea where the time went. They may still live in their childhood homes, work a job that doesn’t fulfill them, and try to depend on their social lives to give themselves any semblance of excitement. And all the while, they still have no clue who they are or where they want to be.

I am part of this last group. It’s exhausting and demoralizing. I feel guilty and ashamed. There are days when I’m glad I don’t have to deal with the stresses of school anymore, and happy that I’m taking time for myself. But most of the time, I am overcome by a debilitating fear that I’ll never find a job I like, I’ll never find the courage to travel and move out and find my independence, and I’ll always be stuck in this limbo between childhood and adulthood.

For those who have it all together, I applaud you. As someone who was always determined and goal-oriented and hardworking, who has somehow become lazy and overwhelmed and scared, you amaze me. You took control of your life in the most unapologetic way. You didn’t wallow in a sense of lacking. And for that, you are thriving.

I don’t know when I’ll catch up to this part of my generation. I know I have so much life to live, but I feel it slipping away with every minute.

So yeah, I was feeling pretty down about life. I was unfairly comparing myself to others, drowning myself in my own pity, and getting caught up in my fears. I had times of very high anxiety and very low depression. I just had no idea what my next step in life was, and I found myself stuck.

I was always a good student. I paid attention, did all my homework, and got good grades. I was on the honour roll every year in high school and graduated university on the Dean’s List. School was just something I was good at, and doing well made me feel like I was worth something. In other words, I put way too much pressure on myself to always get high marks and never fail at anything. School played a huge role in my life, to the point where my educational accomplishments defined me. It also gave me structure and goals to work towards. I followed the traditional educational path: finish elementary and middle school, graduate from high school, and take four years to complete my undergraduate degree. Everything was neat and clean and tied with a bow. I had no idea just how unraveled this neat little package would become.

When you finish your educational journey, you don’t have the structure and guidance of school pushing you forward anymore. It’s all up to you. This may be obvious to most people, and in the months leading up to my university graduation, I knew it was true. But that didn’t make graduating from school to life any easier.

I know I probably manifested a lot of my struggles. I let my anxiety get in the way, I let my fear hold me back, and I let the idea of failure prevent me from even trying. A couple months before I graduated, I started a job search. I applied, even got a couple phone interviews, but nothing ever came out of it. I’m ashamed to say I got discouraged pretty fast. By the time I actually did graduate, I had abandoned my job search and gave in to the fact that I would have to stay at the retail job I started in grade twelve for a little while longer.

I’m sure almost everyone who has graduated from university or college can relate to the frustration of applying for jobs and getting rejected. I saw plenty of people my age go through that struggle, so I expected that to happen. What I didn’t expect was that a few months into my post-grad life, whenever I would muster the motivation to do some job research, I just didn’t find anything that interested me. I tried to convince myself to apply to anything I was even slightly qualified for, but I couldn’t find the motivation to apply to something that didn’t seem like the right fit for me. I guess I was being picky, and I probably could’ve broadened my criteria. It got to the point where searching for jobs heightened my anxiety, and almost caused panic attacks. I would obsessively scroll through countless job search pages, criticizing myself for not finding anything I wanted to apply to, and stressing over the thought of never finding the right job for me. This frustrating job search made me question my worth and doubt my own abilities, and I was too caught up in it to get myself out of that unhealthy mindset. I didn’t even know what I wanted anymore. Plus, I felt so much shame for staying at the same retail job I’d had since grade twelve, and not taking advantage of the countless other opportunities available to me. For a long time, I was stuck in low moods, lack of motivation, and constant anxiety. I lost my inspiration and sense of purpose. I was a mess, with no energy to help myself feel better again.

My anxiety and depression during this time took control of me and how I lived my life. I abandoned my job search completely. I stressed about the uncertainty of my future. I questioned and agonized over where I wanted to be and who I was. It was a painful time, punctuated with my occasional successful attempts at joy, but blanketed by the overwhelming presence of my fears and worries.

That time in my life was a struggle, and I still deal with aspects of it to this day. But the struggle eventually blossomed into a kind of success. Stay tuned for the second part of this post, “Graduating from School to Life Part 2 – The Success”.  

emotionsmental healthyoung adulthood