Post-grad, Pre-everything

I’ve always been a person who lives and thrives in the present moment. The past? Already happened, and trying to overanalyze it is just an empty attempt to change it. The future? Well, that will happen when it happens. 

Then days turn into weeks, weeks turn into semesters, and before I know it I’m standing in line with my fellow Fashion Merchandising and Design majors ready to accept a diploma from a professor I only had once. I was dumbstruck, but also thrilled. I never particularly liked school, sure, there were a few projects I enjoyed and might even say I was passionate about, but the whole concept of the grading system was an immediate loss of motivation for me. I didn’t want a letter or percentage to qualify how “good” my work was, I only cared about my own pride and how I felt about my end results. So, when I created a PowerPoint that perfectly visualized an aesthetic I liked or when I wrote an essay that I actually felt a twinge of intelligence while reading it, that present moment of personal accomplishment was all I thought and cared about.

Unfortunately for me, the prioritization of the present moment has allowed the future to stealthily sneak up on me. All of a sudden my friends have started putting together the puzzle pieces of their lives. Meanwhile I haven’t even bought the box. They’re finding roommates for their new place near their new job, being in film festivals, making connections, working at a non-profit, and what was I doing? Making the drop-of-a-hat decision to work at a boutique at my parents’ beach house for the summer to “figure things out.” I validated myself by saying I wanted to gain experience working at a small business, but that little incessantly shrill voice in the back of my head kept reminding me of my indifference when it came to working in the fashion industry (despite my major of 3.5 years being Fashion Merchandising). However, a seed of hope and possibility was planted in my brain when I began writing for a small, independent online music magazine, Crave Magazine. I was absolutely ecstatic. The only problem was, it’s unpaid. This fact does not take away any joy I feel when writing for them – or about music in general – but the lack of financial credibility does add to the “late bloomer” role that I’ve unwillingly given myself. 

So that was my plan…for the summer that was. I was going to romanticize a summer alone working at a boutique, writing music articles and checking LinkedIn every once in a while. What I didn’t work into my plan was the fact that every employer and company I applied to would ghost me. I consoled myself with the fact that I still had a paying (minimum wage) job. Again, for the summer. So what happens when summer is over, and I drive 5.5 hours back home to the exhilarating land of Leesburg, Virginia, with a dying PT Cruiser full of packed tubs of clothes—and now no job or prospects? I did not, and still don’t, know. With my ever-growing list of failed LinkedIn situationships, I felt like I was stumbling through my life while my peers around me were sprinting. 

It also does not help that American culture, in addition to the comparable lives of random social media people, has set up the nerve-inducing expectation that as soon as you graduate college, you should have a career lined up, an apartment ready to move into, and — just for fun — throw in a stable and loving relationship as well. It’s excruciating how many times I see a woman my age showing off her cutesy and oh-so-aesthetic studio apartment with her creative job that allows her to pay bills all the while indulging in her artistic endeavors. It’s debilitating, this comparison. Online, everyone else seems to be “breaking in” careers that look effortless and perfectly aligned with their passions. Offline, most of us are refreshing inboxes, decoding job postings that may or may not be AI and wondering how we’re supposed to build momentum in a system that seems designed to keep us in the waiting room. All of these factors – friends moving ahead, living with your parents with no job, loss of direction, the ghosting ritual of cold contacting – I’m not going to sugarcoat it, they make you feel like a complete and utter loser. 

I suppose now is the right time for a captivating experience that has given me a sense of enlightenment about my situation. Nope! No one has given me a life-altering piece of advice nor have I had any otherworldly epiphanies about life and its glory. However, despite the pessimism that’s been coating my writing, something has been slowly lifting this expectational weight off my shoulders. Perspective. This isn’t something you can realize and have it change your life at the drop of a hat. It’s a value that you have to ingrain into your way of thinking and into the actions you take every day. There is no secret trick to getting the life you want or to getting out of a slump. There is only you. Annoying, I know — I rolled my eyes as I typed that. It’s so aggravatingly true, though: if you keep obsessing over other people’s lives, yours will fade into oblivion.

I don’t have a five-year plan taped to my wall, and I still flinch a little when someone asks me what I’m doing “next.” But I’m learning that a life doesn’t need to be sprinted through to be meaningful. It can be walked, paused, rerouted, even stalled for a moment. The present is still where I feel most at ease — and maybe that’s not a flaw after all. Maybe this in-between space isn’t a failure, but a recalibration. So no, I’m not “there” yet — wherever there is supposed to be. But I’m here, making choices, writing words that feel like mine and learning to sit with uncertainty instead of fighting it. The future doesn’t need to be solved today. For now, it’s enough to keep choosing myself in small, deliberate ways and trusting that clarity will come.