Graduates: the real world is coming

Lena Dunham writes in her debut novel "Upon graduation I had felt a heavy sense of doom, a sense that nothing would ever be simple again." Graduated one whole year, my first bit of advice to newborn graduates would be: don't set your expectations too high.

Congratulations! You're graduated! You're free! No more late nights finishing essays in a library. No more minus sign next to your bank account. No more annoying housemates. Right?

Even on a decent 'graduate' wage, you'll still need your overdraft

If you try living a Taylor Swift lifestyle on a minimum wage budget, it'll bite you in the ass. Just because you're earning, doesn't mean you can buy everything.

This sucks, and is a lesson to be learnt the hard way. Luckily most banks are forgiving creatures and let you keep the interest free overdraft for a little bit longer.

No more late nights. Full stop.

The "real world" is made up of two kinds of people: morning people, and people who suffer. If you're part of the latter category, to save yourself from a life behind bars for killing the person who wouldn't stop talking before 9am, try adjusting to early(ier) nights.

It sucks, but between those and caffeine, you might not kill anyone.

You can pick your friends, you can't pick your housemates

The chances are you're going to end up in one of two scenarios: living with (new) housemates, or with your parents.

New housemates come with a whole new bunch of issues to deal with. Perhaps they're different ages, earn different salaries, work out at 6am or party hard until 4am? Or, they could be your next best friend (or even boyfriend?!) disguised as the bill keeper.

But living with your parents presents a political minefield. You left the house as a post-pubescent 18 year old. You're coming back as a slightly broken adult. Try integrating now. Both options, potentially, suck.

Graduated one year and what have we learned? Nothing really changes. Three years of bad habits can take more than one year to break. And it kind of sucks, but this is the real world we were all warned about. So, newborn graduates, suck it up, and learn to love it.

"I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath."

Sylvia Plath ruined baths for me - which is surprising because you'd think out of any household object she'd probably ruin ovens.

In The Bell Jar, the self-absorbed, potentially-autobiographical, protagonist nonchalantly claims that she can recall every bathtub she's ever been in. This absolutely torments me.

Each time I take a bath, I lie in that god-forsaken cream coloured tub and try to count backwards all the bathtubs I can remember being in.

This bath: the family house bath, comforting, echoey and shallow.
My last university house: steep and deep and just a bit dirty.
A hotel in Turkey: excellent acoustics for an album or two.
My first university house: undissolved epsom salts and lukewarm water.

Then it starts to get really difficult.

• Did that place have a bath or a shower?
• Do hot-tubs count?
• What if there was someone else in the bath with me?

I like to think that until the moment Esther Greenwood recalled all of her previous bathtubs, she had led a very sheltered life. Perhaps she'd only ever been in three baths - so actually, her recollection ability isn't that impressive.

The point is, The Bell Jar, is not a novel that leaves no lasting affect. When you finish a book, or a TV show or a particularly good film, sometimes you'll experience that sense of loss. What do I do with my life now?

But The Bell Jar has an incredibly unique effect. You don't feel a passing loss for the story or the characters, instead the bell jar itself begins to form around you. Whether it was there before, and you simply didn't see it, or whether it forms with every passing Plath sentence, The Bell Jar - novel and psychiatric condition - becomes more evident, and harder to get over cope with.

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

With lines like that, I was not the only lit student rendered mildly depressed and bedridden post-Plath.

Esther's bathtub speech comes very early into the novel, and, I believe, is a poignant moment in noticing her internal dislocation. She states that she feels more herself when she's in the tub. And she's right. I also never feel so much Esther Greenwood as when I'm in a hot bath.

Moving on

Today marks three weeks since I moved away from my University life.

Technically I cheated and moved back into halls for three wonderful days where I got to party with all of my friends, watch them graduate and do some last minute checking off of Reading things I always wanted to do.

The truth is nobody prepares you for what it feels like to leave those three years behind.

I'm in the early stages. Currently, I'm heartbroken.

I've been forcibly removed from some of the greatest people I've ever encountered. Like most, I had more friends and was more popular and found more like-minded people than I'll probably ever have around me again. Now I'm back in my childhood home. With my two happily married parents, my only-slightly younger brother and the girlfriend that he had before I left. Nothing really changes.

Except before I was used to being on my own.

I spent every single day of the last three years in a magical bubble of friends. Now I have to get used to my own company and I tell you what, it sucks.

I guess this is why people go travelling for six months or dive into a job. The sheer discomfort of not having anything to do or to work towards or to achieve is unbearable. After three years (longer if you count all the education before that) of consistently improving oneself in a structured system, being out of that system, having no safety net of education, I feel like I'm free-falling in slow motion, towards absolutely nothing.

It's an overwhelming experience to have to adjust to so much:

• Being back at home for good and trying not to break down over the fact that it's for an indeterminable amount of time. 
• Trying to get on with your family - people you wouldn't necessarily pick to live with if you were given the choice. 
• Not knowing when you're going to see your friends next. Jobs, money, finding a time when everyone can meet up; all problems.

I'm lucky. I found a job and I start in a week's time. I will have been officially unemployed, officially not a student, for a single month before I begin a career. I'm told it's good. It's healthy to have a break.

I guess it'll get worse before it gets better. I'll be tired at work one day and really have to fight off a fit of tears about how I can't just mong out hungover on a questionable sofa surrounded by half empty bottles, bad tv and best friends.

But I expect (and I really, really hope) that there will be a lot of relapses. A weekend or a birthday here and there that gives us an excuse to relive tequila slammers, long lie-ins and five-way spoons.

What I wanted to be told before I left was that it's going to be so unexpectedly hard to accept that the biggest adventure of my life is over. But I guess my future self would probably tell me that there are more adventures ahead. Until then, I'm taking the days as they come. The good with the bad. Slow and steady. One at a time.

The condition of education

At a very young age I realised I had a much furthered interest in academic study than my parents ever had the opportunity or the desire to pursue.

When I was in primary school, this wasn't an issue; however when I entered secondary school, they very quickly became aware that they were getting out of their depth. They couldn't help me with quadratic equations or tell me the number of electrons in a carbon atom and had no idea who Lenny was or just how much he loved that rabbit.

At the age of 12, I was on my own. There would be no further academic help offered to me at home. Not because they didn't want to of course but because they couldn't. This didn't strike me as strange. People's parents worked and some were smarter than others and some weren't.

When I came to university though, I discovered that people's parents were more academically educated and had even been to university. And not only that but they had an actual vested interest in what their kids studied. My friend studies the same English degree as me and goes home to her both graduated parents and has full conversations, discussions, lengthy, heated arguments about the likes of Brontë and Dickens. How fantastic! To be greeted with enthusiasm and questions and opinions rather than a blank stare, a passing comment and a change of subject.

I don't know how many people educated above their parents feel like their skills aren't appreciated, or worse, felt like their education is perhaps useless, a waste of money and time, when one could be earning money and moving out and "having a life".

In July I will become the first female to graduate on my father's side and the only person to ever go to university, let alone graduate, on my mother's. It's new for them; the opportunities to study are much greater now and the social factors of generation and location mean that this is the first time lots of young people have ventured into further study rather than stretching to a vocational course at college.

Disclaimer: this is not a post slating those who chose not to go into further study. In fact, coming out the other side of university in a few months has given me a fresh, tired perspective that casts a hefty £17,000 debt over my last three years. Maybe I didn't need a degree. Maybe I didn't need to study the Renaissance period or Samuel Beckett or what makes a good preface. I too am weighing up whether it was worth it.

Regardless, it doesn't mean that the potential to further myself academically wasn't there. Perhaps I'm being a brat. I was supported financially to do this. Perhaps, intellectually, I should have realised that I am still on my own.