It’s back to school season once again! You may be starting semester of high school, eager to leave all of that middle school drama behind (trust me, drama never goes away) or you may be terrified because you’re going into your first semester of your freshmen year of college.
OR you may be the newly graduated 20-something staring longingly at the funderland of school supplies in the back of Target when you’re supposed to be buying a toaster for your new apartment.
As someone who has almost made it through their first summer of not being a student, I’m here to share the five stages of grieving the loss of your youth and coming to terms with the fact that you actually have to pull your life together.:
Denial
The summer after your final semester of college is a strange one, because it starts out feeling normal: You get out of school, it gets hot and you enjoy doing stuff with friends who are also on vacation, just as you have for the last 15+ summers of your young life. It's so easy to go on convincing yourself that nothing's different about your life. It only really starts to sink in when you start getting student loan payment information in the mail and seeing kids complaining on Twitter about having to go back to school...
Anger
The frustration with your new life situation starts to flood in. Why does the state want this money back? Why couldn’t you have just been a loser and taken like nine years to graduate and avoid being an actual adult? Why are you still too young to be taken seriously but too old to have your mom do adult things for you? Why don’t these children understand how good they have it being protected by the education system?
Bargaining
After you've finished yelling your frustrations from your bedroom window, you start to think of all those people going back to school and how you’d give anything to relive those years of your life. “I wish I could just go back to school and be a professional student until I get this whole 'adulthood' thing down,” you may think. “Can I just pull a Freaky Friday with a student who is actually prepared for real life and finish out their education for them while they deal with real life for me?”
Depression
You may find yourself binging on more junk food and Netflix than you’re proud of admitting. You may find yourself feeling like you didn’t learn anything while in school as you look through all the applications for jobs you feel totally unqualified for. Maybe you miss the learning environment of your college, or your classmates and roommates or simply the presence of someone else riding the struggle bus with you. More than anything though, you regret all the little things you didn't do in college that you feel would have made the best years of your life even greater.
Acceptance
A quarter-life crisis and nine seasons of Friends later, your depression will begin to subside. Yes, there may be a lingering feeling of sadness of a simpler, more comfortable time in life when you could still proclaim yourself to be a child and not feel like such a loser. However, you will soon come to accept that you are entering into your 20’s with your degree in your hand and a whole life ahead of you. You're much more prepared to be an adult than you think you are... or at least just as prepared as all of the other adults who don't know what they're doing either!
