Hey There!
It actually happened. I don’t know how it happened but… it did. I have officially earned a piece of paper more expensive than anything else I own. It might be a more expensive piece of paper than all the other things I own put together… I don’t know if that’s impressive or depressing.
Of course college education is about a lot more than a diploma, and, for me, it’s about more than the degree itself. I learned things I didn’t expect to learn. My academics actively made me a better person than I was before, and opened my eyes to issues that my baby blues were utterly blind to. It also exposed me to some of the best and worst behaviors in humans. I spent many a sleepless night studying, helping friends through crisis, or even simply starting at the ceiling and wondering if this would all be worth it. I still ask whether the debt and the time and the stress and the crisis was worth it. But I can say, with confidence, that I am a better person than the version of myself who graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA certain that college would be easy.
Well. Maybe I was never naive enough to think that it would be easy, but I certainly didn’t know it would be so very much harder than high school.
The list of things I would have never expected or prepared for is miles longer than the paper which represents my ability to adjust to the realities and challenges of those problems.
Like most of my fellow graduates, I imagine, the future is both exciting and terribly frightening. I don’t know how the next phases of my life will unfold, and I know it because of all the things I didn’t know when I graduated high school.
As for my absence here, on this website, I can only beg your forgiveness of a poor, over-caffeinated, sleep deprived, stressed college student with approximately 50 pages of academic essays to complete and grades and graduation on the line. I love you all, but there were bigger things on my plate.
Now that I’m back though, and oh boy is there a lot to talk about, I can only say I look forward to finding out what the big bright world looks like from the other side of my formal education. I’m back, and we’ll craft a guiding light out of the chaos together.
Shall we?
-R.
IlluminatedChaos 