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.
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