Carly Explains it All: Graduation

I’ve had a twitch in my left eye since March. Everyone from my boss to my best friend has tried giving me advice on how to stop it, but the thing just doesn’t want to go away. I’ve done everything from eating bananas (extra potassium) to placing my hand under my armpit and applying pressure (an ancient Chinese breathing technique), but deep down I know there’s only one real cure: graduation.

At the beginning of last semester I wrote an article about how exciting senior year can be, and how we all should relax and appreciate these last moments we have as students. But now I’m having a hard time taking my own advice. I’m trying to enjoy the little time I have left, but the eye twitch is a physical reminder that I might be taking things a little too seriously. It’s three weeks before graduation and I’ve never felt more like a chicken with its head cut off.

Like many soon-to-be graduates, my life has become a circus ring of unfinished senior work, unpaid internship work, drafts of cover letters and resumes, ibuprofen, neglected friends, piles of dirty laundry and a practically empty refrigerator. As my senior friend Ben so eloquently put it, “I’ve got many balls in the air right now.”

I’m beginning to see myself in misguided movie characters, like Andrew McCarthy in “St. Elmo’s Fire” and Winona Ryder in the opening scene of “Reality Bites” when she gives her valedictorian speech in front of her entire graduating class.

“The question remains: What are we going to do now? How can we repair all the damage we inherited? Fellow graduates, the answer is simple. The answer is — the answer is — I don’t know.”

As much as I’d love to tell you that I can add some clarity to this blurred moment in time, I can’t. I don’t know, either. Up ‘til now, I’ve always been the girl with a plan, and that’s why I’ve felt confident in the past with “explaining it all.” For the first time, though, your guess is as good as mine. But that’s not a bad thing.

We just have to understand that this stress is natural and to not let it get the best of these last couple of weeks. Because five years from now, maybe even for the rest of our lives, we’ll all be wishing our problems were as simple as final papers and dirty dishes.