38. A letter to my brother
And to anyone else who's graduating this year.
Dear: my brother and anyone else who is graduating this year,
University is almost over and your graduation is around the corner. Once you’ve gotten through the last hurdle of final exams and due assignments, you’re hit with a graduation ceremony and then, an empty void of “what next?”.
You haven’t stopped “being at school” since primary school, it’s been year after year onto the next thing. There was no need to think about what you were going to “do next” because summer holidays were a time to enjoy yourself and stop thinking about school, homework, teachers and exams, until now.
Now, the thought of this year’s summer holidays causes butterflies in your stomach because you don’t have a plan. You’ve been so focused on getting to the finish line that you didn’t stop to think about what your next move would be, but does that matter? In my opinion, no.
You’ve given your all this last year to do your best and finish on time with a score you’re happy with. You didn’t have time to start planning for the future too. Anyway, does anyone know what they want from the future?
These are your last weeks as a student, you’ll never get this back. You’ll never just be “a student” again. As you walk out of your university’s doors, you walk into the adult jungle where everyone is fighting for a job, applying for masters to carry on being students, crying and worrying about what to do next… Nobody knows, it’s not just you. But the thing is, this is normal: when you’ve been living on autopilot since a tiny human waiting for the next year to roll around and that’s all of sudden gone, you feel scared.
You feel scared, lost, alone, worried and all of a sudden a lot older.
Everyone starts to ask what you’re going to do now: are you going to go on to do a masters and pay for that too, or are you going to go and find a fantastic high paying job now that you’re a university graduate? Well, to be honest, you don’t need an answer right now. You’re allowed to tell them that you don’t know or that you haven’t thought about it yet. You’re allowed to give yourself some time to digest that this period of your life has just ended and you’re also allowed to sit with your thoughts and feelings until you find some answers.
Answers don’t fall from the sky and nobody wakes up one morning with their whole life mapped out from a dream or an act of God. You will have to go step by step, following your intuition and trying as many paths as you can until you find something that feels right. There’s no rush to find your “dream job” and you won’t be more successful if you find it right away. Give yourself the time and the room to experiment, to try and fail.
Forget about what comes after your graduation and forget about the life you have ahead of you for now, take up every single second of this you’re living. Enjoy these last assignments, hand everything in with a good intention, ask your teachers those questions you never asked them, really feel and give your work your all… because soon, there won’t be more of it.
You may decide to do a masters or to study another degree at some point in the future, but it will never be your first time again; you’ll have experience and knowledge from this first time. Take in all of these feelings and just feel them and most of all, enjoy them.
Taking exams and handing in final projects is stressful and nobody likes doing it, you’ve had to do a lot of work over the course of many years, but now it’s all coming to an end and you can’t go back in time to start again. I repeat, enjoy it.
Smile as you press “submit” and tick things off your to do list, think about everything you’ve learned doing these tasks. Your university experience is coming to an end and at this moment of time this feels like the biggest thing in your whole entire life, and right now, it is! But as time goes on, this too will become a distant memory that you just “got done” and you’ll wonder why you worried so much. Remember when you left to go the UK and that felt like the biggest adventure you’d ever embark on? How does it feel now?
We grow at the speed of light and life passes by in the blink of an eye and as we watch it go by, the biggest milestones we’ve lived become blurry memories at the back of our brains. All of these anxious feelings, fears and worries will be resolved. You will resolve them one by one in your own time and at your own pace.
But for now, I hope you feel extremely proud of yourself for accomplishing your dreams - you did it.
LET’S TALK ⬇️
Pomelo is an open letter from me to you and it’s the most fun when I get to read your replies so please, if you have something so say, open a discussion in the comments section.
Or, consider answering some of the following questions:
Have you graduated from university? If so, did you feel lost when it was over?
What advice would you give to someone graduating this summer?
If you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself when finishing your degree?
If you graduated a long time ago, what advice could you give the younger readers from your adult experiences?
@ me already why don’t you. Yet another week where you are saying everything that I need to hear❤️🔥