Part of my plan for post-graduate life is to write a book. After thinking about it for a long time (four weeks is a long time, right?) I decided to write about the challenges college graduates face. My plan is to write 50,000 words in one month (according to the Bethel College Challenge) and so far I’m about… well lets see, it’s June 8th so… I’m about 7 days behind. Surprising, right?
Anyways, it’s a work in progress, but I have about 3 sections done and the rest planned out. I don’t know what’s going to come of it all, but I decided to post the introduction to the book. Let me know your thoughts and comments! My WiFi is a bit spotty for the next several months (on account of me working as a summer camp cook) but I’ll try to respond as well as I can!
Section 1: Fire, Water, and Goblins
I will never forget the day I graduated college. Growing up, I had always struggled with school. I was never brilliant or especially gifted or smart, but I knew how to work hard, probably accredited to me being the third oldest of the eleven kids in my family. There was always something to do in my family—laundry that needed folding, dishes that needed doing, babies that needed holding—and so my family was in the habit of working hard to make our family run like well-oiled machine. It was rarely easy, but my parents made it clear that hard work was an expectation for being a Kreis. This mentality carried over to my college career. I had never worked so hard for anything, let alone an education, and I lived each year on a day-by-day basis. “One more four a.m. study session.” “Two more eight-page papers.” “Just one more meeting.” “Only one more coffee-induced homework coma.” I lived day-by-day for four years with my eye on the prize: a bachelors degree reading “English Education,” decorated with a shiny, gold “magna cum laude” ribbon. And my golly, I got it, even if it came close to killing me.
However, even more than the day I graduated college, I’ll always remember the morning after. It played out like a bad chick-flick. You know, the one that starts out with the protagonist waking up with a bad hang over because her last single friend got married the night before, and she realized that the only thing she’s done so far with her life was sabotage every relationship she’s ever had, work a mediocre job where she can’t stand her co-workers, and kill a goldfish. Okay, now insert me.
I woke up to two of my roommates being gone, the apartment nearly cleared out, half a jar of peanut butter in the cabinet, and a feeling of impending doom. I had no job lined up after my part-time gig ended in August, didn’t know what state I was going to live in, had no idea who I was going to live with, and had approximately twenty-six dollars to my name (that’s including the three dollars in nickels and dimes rolling around in my car).
As I sat in my living room, the sun streamed in through my windows and cars rushed past on the busy road outside my window. The longer I sat there, the more desperate I began to feel. Have you ever seen the movie Daylight? Well, don’t. It’s a horribly claustrophobic movie about a group of people who get stuck in the subway system in New York (or somewhere like that) and there’s water or fire or goblins or something closing in on them and they’re trapped in this crumbling transit system. So the whole movie is them going further and further into this maze of tunnels, basically hoping they find the light at the end of it, and if I remember correctly, they all die. Or they all live… yeah, that’s probably what happened. Or maybe some of them died and some of them lived… I think the little girl lived. I mean, who would make a movie where the little kids die? Well, I think that happens in The Mist. And doesn’t the kid die at the end of The Sixth Sense?
I’m digressing.
The point is, there’s no way out of the tunnel—the only option they had was to go further into the mess. And that’s exactly where I found myself. I couldn’t escape life, I had to continue forward and hope to find the figurative daylight before the water or fire or student loan people caught up to me. It was kind of terrifying.
I realized that I had spent my entire four years in college preparing for the next day and never really preparing for life. I could speed read through 50 pages of textbook pages or compile a perfectly organized portfolio, but I couldn’t begin to tell you how to look for an apartment or, better yet, afford one.
Maybe you’ve found yourself in a similar situation. Perhaps you’ve woken up one day, getting ready for your job and suddenly realized that you want more than this, but failed to plan for it. Maybe you too got to your prize—high school graduation, college graduation, marriage, parenthood—and realized that you hadn’t thought past your goal. What do you do when you’ve completed what you set out to do? What do you do when you get to the “end” and it doesn’t look like what you were expecting it to look like? There’s no job waiting, no clear direction for your life, no ring on your finger. What do you do when the fire and water and goblins are chasing you and getting a little too close for your comfort?
What do you do?
Tammi Talk 