All The Time In The World

    The last few months before graduation were perhaps the most stressful of my college career. It was not because of the school work, I had developed a strategy for dealing with insane amounts of work which involved a twenty-four ounce can of Red Bull, an isolated room in the library, and a long stick for poking anyone within a fifteen foot circumference who attempted to approach me. 

    Rather, it was the terrifying prospect of not having the comforting title of “college student” anymore. When someone asked me what I was doing with my life I could respond that I was going to school and the pressure was off, at least partially. I could shrug off the other unpleasant questions like “What are your plans for the future?” or “Where will you go for graduate school?” because being in school implied that I would figure it out along the way. I was in college and everyone knew that going to college was the only way that you could get a job and make money and be successful. The future? I couldn't be bothered to worry about it, my Creative Writing degree would take care of that when the time came.

   Somewhere in my subconscious I must have been aware of how utterly unprepared I was. This awareness started to manifest itself in the final few months of my senior year. I was extremely anxious and grew irritable whenever someone brought up the topic of graduation. I entertained wild notions of intentionally failing all my classes just so that I would be forced to stay another semester and thereby buy myself a little more time to figure things out.

    Needless to say, I did not fail my classes. I attended the Commencement ceremony and it was not until I was sitting among row after row of black angular hats, sweating under the synthetic fabric and fiddling with the program that I actually felt excited about graduating. It wasn't any of the speeches at graduation that inspired or moved me, but something one of my professors had said to me in the final weeks as I sat in her office feeling inept.

    

“You will never have more time than you do right now.”

   Although it didn't feel like it, I knew that she was right. Having just graduated college with no obligations to anyone but myself, no real job and no plans for the future: I have all the time in the world.