I feel like every special occasion that we've experienced since age thirteen feels monumental. Like a coming-of-age-shit-I'm-growing-up moment that we look forward to until it happens and then we're like "seriously, can't a girl get a nap time in class anymore?"
I mean, think about it. We turn thirteen and everyone tells us we're no longer kids. Then we turn sixteen and they give us car keys and consensual sex. Eighteen and we are LEGALLY adults: voting in elections, buying porn and dip... ya know, because adults need rights to nudity and cancer.
We graduate high school and enter the real world of college campuses, trusted just enough to live on our own (under the supervision of our peers). This is where the consensual sex really comes to fruition and Sex On The Beach is actually just Cherry Burnetts and OJ from the dining hall, but it totally tastes like the real thing, don't you think?
We turn twenty-one and they put beers in our hands as if we hadn't had them there before and the car keys they gave us five years prior look even scarier on the way home from a bar than they did on the way home from soccer practice.
And today, I hit the next benchmark -- I am a college graduate. Talk about a coming-of-age-shit-I'm-growing-up moment... but the weird thing is that I have 0% confidence in how I should be feeling, or thinking, or honestly what I should be doing. Did today really make me an adult?
Everyone keeps talking about how they're not ready for real life and I don't even know what it means. For example, this past Monday night we had a bar crawl for senior students only. At the last bar, I kissed a guy (the guy who only gives me the time of day if it's not the same time new jordans are released... you all know him well). So anyway, I stopped kissing him, turned to my friend, and she said, "Ya know, it's fine because this is the last time you can do things like that!" ... not that I'm saying she is wrong, but I received and read my diploma today and it didn't make reference to an alumni prohibition of bar-kissing.
Obviously I'm exaggerating, but it's all very confusing. We create these perceptions of what real life will be like. As if because I have my name on a piece of paper next to the words magna cum laude and I'm suddenly supposed to use my knowledge of mental disorders and social constructions to guide all of my actions and decisions in a mature and professional way? I'm not saying that my education has not propelled me toward success because I actually do believe I'm qualified intellectually to enter the infamous real world, I'm just also wondering what else is changing? What else should be changing? How should I be changing?
If anyone has the answers or thinks they might, I'm totally down to listen, but until then I guess this is the first real life challenge in store for college graduates. Welcome to the Real World.
