Coping with Change
My life is about a change either a whole lot or a medium lot, and I’m not sure which it’s going to be yet.
I’m graduating college next week, something I never actually believed would happen, for reasons that have shifted over the years.
I made it this far, but I shouldn’t have. I should have taken a break. I should have taken care of myself.
As I’ve listed all the biggest things I’m looking forward to after college to my friends who graduated before me, I’ve realized how basic the human needs that I’m longing for are: a sleep schedule, morning runs, cleaning, eating vegetables.
I’ve been imagining what it will be like to write something because I want to, to read books as hungrily as I used to.
Most of all, I’ve been trying to imagine what my life will be like when I don’t have to mask so often — not face-masking, though I’ll be happy when that’s over too, but the personal kind of masking. I’m looking forward to being in more spaces where it’s okay for me to be myself, spaces where I belong. I don’t want feel like a problem anymore the way I feel in the classroom.
I have cried actual tears of joy thinking about leaving college.
I don’t want to make my college experience seem like it was all bad. I made good friends here. I learned good things. I learned how to learn more. I learned about my own needs and boundaries.
The problem is that I pushed myself too hard for too long, and I have a lot to heal from because of it.
And right now, I’m just tired.
I’m exhausted.
My brain feels like a lumpy soup, and I’m scooping out chunks of it into my professors’ hands.
I’m running out of soup chunks.
When I’m scared or stressed or really feeling any particularly intense emotion, I lose my ability to speak. That verbal switch has been flickering on and off for the past week or two, and that issue made my last two presentations take more than their fair share of soup chunks.
So I’ve been sleeping a lot. Trying to heal in my body, at least enough to make it through this week.
And then it’ll be over.
There isn’t much that I know for sure about what my life will look like in the next year or two. The only thing that I’m really sure of is that my life is going to look much different.
My inital response to some of these changes has been terror. I’m terrified of whatever is coming next looking anything like college.
But the thing I’m really excited about is the fact that I get to take all the good parts about college with me.
I’ll still have every friend I made. I’ll still have all the good things I learned. I have an even greater passion for reading, better technical knowledge of writing, better direction in how to spend my future years of learning.
Some things won’t change. The good things are staying.
