Commencement

com·mence·ment (k-mnsmnt)
n.
1. A beginning; a start.

It's graduation season. For graduate, college, and high school students this is the time of year when you celebrate the end of an era while simultaneously looking at the beginning of a new phase. For me, I always thought commencement signaled the end, but as we can see by my cool dictionary definition above, it actually means the beginning.

Graduation sucked. No seriously, I was devastated. I hate change. I dislike the adjustment period. I don't like making new friends, dealing with the new schedules, the new environments. I like keeping things the way I like them. So it of course makes sense that the whirlwind of graduation completely threw me, and this was especially the case after college.

As a kid, I could see myself at the age of 16, in all of it's teenage glamour. And at 16, I could see myself as an independent college kid. But, in college, I could not see myself out of it. I wasn't on a "track" to be a doctor- I really wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do with myself. All I knew as I approached the deadline of May 2007 was that I knew who I was at the University of Maryland and had no idea who I could be outside of it.

I struggled immensely with the changes that came after college. I consistently told people that, "I would sell my soul to go back to 2005"... and I meant it. I was the president of my sorority, studying what I loved, and my schedule felt like it was all my own- what wasn't to like? Being thrown into the "real" world felt like a harsh reality filled with responsibility that I did not want to deal with yet. And I am sure I am not the only one who felt this way.

There is this expectation that once you graduate college you need to decide what to do with the rest of your life. Well, that is quite ambitious. If you are lucky, you have a good 60 years of life after graduating college, is it realistic to make this huge decision at 22? Probably not. And there are 80 year olds who still have not decided what they want to do. Since graduating college I've vacillated between going back to law school, my job in media, and teaching history. You know what, I could actually accomplish all three if I wanted to. Or not, but either way being indecisive and questioning where I wanted to be was and is okay.

That is the moment when I realized that graduating college was a beginning, not an end. It's the beginning of the long phase of being an adult. Your mid 20's are all about being indecisive and embracing change, essentially you are throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. While change is scary, not growing up would be worse. It took me a good two years to mourn the loss of my college years, but I am happy with the path my life has taken since... and I have memories from "the best four years of my life" to keep me smiling.