I’m not titling this “On Graduation” or “On Graduating” – it’s this sort of periphrastic perfect that I think does the best job of describing how I feel about this thing. It’s an action that happened in the past and has changed the state of the present. My present.
Anyway.
So I have graduated.
The most striking and strange thing about having graduated is that I’m still alive. The simple act of waking up and doing the morning chores – feeding pets, watering plants, making coffee – evokes in me a feeling of mild incredulity. I graduated, I have graduated. In the past four years I never even imagined a life after graduation; it was my lighthouse at the end of the road, a dead-end to a winding and unrelenting path on which I had found myself. Truthfully, I was never able to see an end to it. I never imagined past life as a student.
I’m still a student, and I know that I will always be, in a certain way. Because if there’s anything that I’ve learned from four years here, it’s that I don’t know shit. Which sounds a bit self-defeating, but the knowledge that I know essentially nothing is kind of like a philosophical nudge-nudge towards what else the world can hold, and what I can get from it.
I’ve always had a problem with moving forward, reaching for things, ambition, anticipation. I have a tendency to think I don’t deserve any of it. Which I know is not true, that it’s that silly self-predatory mind-brain-head-box that both is and is not me. I am still having trouble reconciling my own self with the individual whose name appears on those two diplomas that I stashed in the back of a cabinet.
I’m also unemployed at the moment, looking head-on at the gaping maw of student loans approaching fast. I’m doing my best to appease the beast. And I expect that eventually, even if you get eaten, you can get used to anything.
Another thing the past four years have impressed into me: the distinction/connection between acceptance and failure, and the fact that these linked and soldered concepts are not incidental. That is, they don’t punctuate life, as actions that happen and then fade away, leaving their consequences. They are stative; they are conditional; they are circumstantial. You fail, you accept it.
Again, self-defeating brainbox on board here. Every step I take in this new post-graduation world seems like something that constitutes not living, but “living on.” There’s a chapter in a Lauren Berlant book that talks about “living on” as a condition of society. I had to read it sometime back in November or so. I don’t remember much else of it. Living on is living without agency, living just enough for the reproduction of one’s own self for the next moment. Simply continuing.
I graduated on Saturday, June 13, 2015, and I didn’t feel triumphant, or relieved, or as if the four years were worth it. I felt numb, and tired, and sweaty from the long ceremony and falling asleep 3 or 4 times. I felt irritated at having to shepherd my family through the day. I felt the same tiredness I’d started to feel back in winter of my third year. An extension of the chronic ache in some part of me that I have to call my self.
It’s Wednesday, June 24, 2015. Eleven days after the fact, and I am still alive. Or rather, I am still living on. I am still continuing.
A friend of mine told me that it won’t keep feeling like this. So hollow. And I know she’s right.
It’s up to me now to make some meaning out of things.
I’m less defeated than I sound. I’ve done more than I ever thought I would back in high school. I’ve gone to Greece – twice. I’ve heard the crows caw before sunrise, seen the sunrise itself over a frozen expanse that my brain insisted had to be the ocean. I’ve met people and created relationships and realized the strange unknown-ness of my own embodied self. I’ve had religion and lost it and had it again. I’ve put so much of myself into my writing that I’ve emerged empty and faced life again to be filled. I’ve lived and loved and learned.
And I know that it is not over.
ta hypomnemata 