Everyone is moving on, but you’re still stuck
Eleven months ago, I submitted my Master’s dissertation, and after feeling accomplished for about five minutes, I was ready to move on to the next thing, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what that was. I had spent the better part of twenty-one years as a student, a role in which I had learned to excel. I was an adult with training wheels, but those were finally coming off. I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I no longer knew what to say whenever I was introduced to new people and was met with my least favourite question: What do you do? For a while, I leaned into humour, framing this period of my life as funemployment (and am therefore so sorry to everyone who’s had to deal with my antics for the past eleven months). I quickly learned that staving off a quarter-life crisis is a lot easier when you’re in perpetual motion. For months, I’d come back to my flat in London to unpack, do laundry and repack. I was never home for more than a couple of weeks at a time, the sweet spot of not having to confront a lack of routine, whilst keeping ties to my life here. For the past eleven months, I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs, but I’ve also found myself in countless spirals, reconsidering every career option and coping mechanism in the books. These are the highlights.
Joining a convent or becoming a lawyer
As I wrapped up my dissertation, I allowed myself to relax as I was finally done with school for the foreseeable future. I was optimistic; the future was a source of excitement, not anxiety. I had drunk the Kool-Aid and dreamt of my corporate baddie era. In October, I packed my bags and fled towards the warmth and familiarity of Brazil. Polishing up my CV before my family woke up and sending off applications from airport lounges, I allowed myself to slow down and enjoy my newfound freedom, thinking that surely by this time next year I’d be happily shackled by capitalism. For anyone who didn’t graduate with a job lined up, the all too familiar now what? can be disorienting to say the least. As someone who’s notoriously type A and needs a plan, my unravelling started early on. At an alumni event, I caught up with a girl I always looked up to in High School. We’d taken a lot of the same classes and attended the same uni. She was a year older (and several years wiser), and so I always took any offhand advice as gospel. After making the most of the open bar, I cracked, telling her I had no idea what to do next. Hearing that she had also felt momentarily lost as a post-grad was like finding out the Queen does her own groceries. She had just finished up a law conversion and would be travelling for the next year before coming back to London to start her training contract. Because I’m sometimes clueless and easily impressionable, I left that night considering a career in law for the first time. It brought along structure and a defined timeline, and for the next six months, I’d flip through the bookmarked courses late into the night, flirting with the idea whenever I started feeling a little lost.
After a particularly low week, I’m not completely sure how, but I ended up researching convents in Italy. The same things that appealed to me in law also made running away to the middle of nowhere to live with nuns seem like the answer. It wasn’t necessarily about the religious aspect, but instead the appeal of a simple life, someone telling me what to do (a recurring theme you’ll come to notice), being taken care of, having a routine. I thought it all made perfect sense, until I told my friends and was met with varying levels of concern. In the hushed confessional tone reserved for drunken moments in the back of an Uber, I told a friend that I was feeling hopeless, and with the way things were going, I was going to either find Jesus or the bottom of a bottle. I was raised Catholic, but have a nuanced and oscillating relationship with faith and religion. Feel free to roll your eyes as I say that the unemployment/post-grad period made me realise why so many people turn to religion in troubling times. On vacation with my family in Italy, I found myself popping into every church I passed, getting down on my knees and bargaining — how many Hail Marys were acceptable in exchange for a grad job? I was ready to appeal to every deity, reaching new levels of superstition. I found myself deep into manifestation TikTok, I did research on Etsy witches and put my trust in Japanese Daruma dolls, believing that everything would work out as I looked at the single painted eye every night before bed. I tried to think back to what I had done wrong, wondering if I had to right the mistakes of a past life before I’d be allowed out of this limbo.
Have you considered… running away, running a marathon, journaling, feeling guilty, making jokes, therapy, volunteering, antidepressants, drinking more water, getting another degree… yes.
Running away wasn’t a deliberate attempt, but more so the consequence of subconsciously realising that I would press play on my post-grad(quarter-life?) crisis whenever I slowed down. What do you do? quickly became my least favourite question, with how are you doing? trailing closely behind. I would take creative liberties answering both. With my graduation ceremony scheduled for late January, I told everyone from September to December that I was waiting to graduate, which wasn’t untrue. I’ve found myself asking friends and ChatGPT alike what the acceptable timeframe is for telling people you’ve recently graduated. Signing up for a marathon last year wasn’t a completely impulsive decision. It was something I’d always wanted to do, and with spots opening a year in advance, it felt like a problem for my future self. As I’ve reached the point in training where I’m doing half-marathons (or more) every weekend, I keep telling myself that this is (hopefully) the last time in my life where I’ll have this much free time and flexibility. As much as I enjoy complaining about it, it was (and sometimes still is) the only thing getting me out of the house. I also started writing a lot more this year, both for myself and for the first time since university, for other people. As my friends (who bless them have heard me rant and watched me break down several times this past year) have pointed out, this year has been nothing like what I expected, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. I’ve met new people and reconnected with friends I’d lost touch with, largely thanks to oversharing online. As I’ve tried to fill my time in a meaningful way, I keep telling myself that I don’t want to waste this time. I never planned to take the year off. I’ve never been good about taking breaks, but this time it was out of my hands. I had to sit with boredom and strip away the distractions; I could no longer stay in autopilot and had to start making decisions.
Nothing fits anymore
… and I don’t know who I am. I’ve been a student for most of my life, and now I don’t know how to define myself. I’ve measured time by milestones, pressing restart every September with the beginning of a new school year. I spent years working on the theory, and now that I’ve been thrown out into the real world, I’ve quickly realised that means nothing without having practice. I’m stuck in a weird limbo, and I sometimes feel like I’m regressing. I’ve become insecure again, but now, unlike my neurotic fifteen-year-old self, who was worried about not being skinny or pretty enough, I have since become endowed with the nuance that comes with age. I now worry about not being interesting or smart or competent enough. I catch myself overthinking more than ever before, wondering if I was too much, if I said something wrong, if I could and should have done things differently. I’ve outgrown relationships and had to relearn how to make friendships work as our priorities shift. Taking a step back and looking at your life from an outside perspective, or sometimes bringing an outsider in, can also make you start to reconsider.
Adulthood feels like a bit of a scam
This has been another running theme from the past year, and I’d like to at least partially blame my state of limbo. In the past year, I’ve had friends move in with their significant others, get engaged, lose a parent, buy a house, get their dream jobs, break off five-year relationships and completely pivot career paths. I’ve had several conversations that could be summed up by we’re too young for this. It’s not an omnipresent feeling for most of us, but it creeps up from time to time. We’ve all experienced the shock of listening in on a friend’s work call, watching with awe as they transform from the person you’ve seen puking behind a trash can at two am into the kind of person who writes dear network posts on LinkedIn. It happens when you look at the people who have been growing up alongside you, and you realise that if they’re adults, then you should be too. At my age, my mom was married and working in the biggest newspaper in the country, whilst I still call her for input before getting a haircut or meeting someone for coffee. In the past year, she’s taken to reminding me that she had a life before me, and not in a I used to be cool and hip way, but more so in a I’ve been messy too way. Growing up, The Little Prince was one of my favourite books, and it’s still one I revisit from time to time, as a hopeful reminder that you can grow up without becoming a grown-up. I’ve always rolled my eyes whenever people started talking about their inner child in conversation, but maybe they’re onto something when they say that’s the voice you should be listening to (though if there are lots of voices in your head, maybe get that checked out). It’s less about giving in to every whim without any regard for future consequences, and more about taking away the pressure to succeed, to impress and please everyone else.
I’d normally want to wrap this up nicely, but I still haven’t figured out this whole grown-up thing. If you enjoyed this piece or have any contacts in the Vatican, let me know! I’ve also written a bit more on the post-grad experience in In Defence of Messiness and Sell Yourself! — when the cover letters and dating app prompts converge.
I have an exorcist priest in the Vatican who’s information I can give you if you want
Adulthood is such a scam