The Post-Grad Journey: The Best Time of Your Life?

By Charlsie

“College is the best time of your life.” If you are in college, you will indisputably hear this more than a few times throughout your undergraduate years. Being told over and over again that college is in fact, “the best time of your life” is kind of intimidating – especially after graduation, leaving questions such as “If these past four years have been the very best, then what will I look forward to in the future?” to pop up.

My personal M.O. was to toss that belief aside as I embarked upon this next stage of my life. Why dwell in the past just because I won’t have the security of undergraduate antics to hide behind anymore and it’s time to face the music of the real world? (Despite John Mayer warning us that there’s no such thing as the real world, just a lie you got to rise above.) Instead of idealizing college as many people do, I have taken the approach that it’s okay to look back fondly and smile, but to not hold it too close or else I’ll never let go. And who wants to be one of those girls in their mid-30s recounting their college days as if they just happened?

However, I am not always perfect at sticking to my plans.

So, after looking for a job (for what seemed like forever), I finally found a nannying position that fits well with my LSAT studying schedule and writing gigs. For a few weeks now, I’ve been watching two girls (ages three and 16 months), and everything was going great – until the other night. This night can go down in the babysitting books as the night that made me want to crawl all the way back to Virginia (where my alma mater is), break into my old dorm room, and rewrite my entire thesis again (yes, the one that I will gladly never read again if I can avoid it).

From the minute the parents left, the two little girls went on what seemed like a wild rampage of testy behavior. Instead of calming down, despite my efforts to entertain, they just got more and more worked up. This resulted in dinner being thrown across the kitchen (do you know how long it takes to clean up couscous off the floor when you can’t find a broom?), and dessert – the one thing that I suspected would make them happy – all over me. Yeah, that’s right; as the three year old declared “You’re not my mommy!” she dumped her entire bowl of peach cobbler on me. The bowl met my hair, then my shoulders, and then my cardigan – as my hair became soaked with cobbler goo.

Standing there with orange globs rolling out of my hair, college life kept coming to mind. How easy it all seemed three months ago. I was thinking “What if I was going back to school?” or “What if I was starting over again, as a first year at some huge public university?” (the complete opposite of my undergrad experience). All this thinking led me to ponder why we all put so much emphasis on those years. And here’s what I’m thinking…

Throughout college, we spend all this time dressing up for formals, planning how we are going to tie our toga for the frat party, and matching clothes with our friends before heading out for weekend parties. We spend all this time inside the classroom, and even more time outside of the classroom thinking and talking about what we learn and why it’s important to us. We live in this bubble where you have to mix pleasure with hard work. And then all of a sudden, the bubble bursts – and here we are, scrambling to find jobs, a place to live, the meaning of life, and most importantly ourselves outside of the context of the last four years.

Life after college puts everyone in some kind of limbo, and this idle time makes us yearn for the past, and while our present usually seems not quite what we imagined it to be – it’s exactly that, the present. So, why does it seem so hard to see the future?

I’ll be the first to tell you, the post-grad journey doesn’t come with a manual. And although no one gave me a pamphlet my first day of college that mapped everything that would happen to me throughout college, I still felt sheltered around my peers, my professors, my parents, and everything and everyone in between telling me what to do and how to do it – and that worked as my compass along the way. Now though, I’m my own compass. And on days when a three-year-old throws peach cobbler on you, it’s no wonder I want to turn my compass in the opposite direction to get as close as possible to what I thought was “the best time of my life.”

Even though I know playing nanny is only temporary, and I do have a lot to look forward to in the future (even if the future seems very far and distant at this very moment), I also know that some days – you can’t help but reminisce.