Most people view the college commencement ceremony as this monumental moment in their life. You go through a wholly positive experience and are met by friends and relatives celebrating your achievement. People are expectedly a little scared and maybe wishing they could stay a little longer, but essentially, people want to believe that their graduation day should be celebrated with the same kind of energy you see at weddings or your team winning the championship. I took a different, and ultimately more private, approach to my graduation day.

Thanks to pop culture, everyone thinks that they’ll hear some sort of uplifting theme playing from the depths of their psyche as they’re seated, waiting for their class to be called. They all think that every moment will be painted into their memory for the rest of their lives. What they all want is for everyone to be cheering their name as they take the stage and collect their diploma. They want a parade thrown so that they feel safe in the knowledge that this is a great and noble thing they’ve accomplished.
Save for the truly accomplished students, there’s no real parade on graduation day. Just about everyone feels the sort of mundane air around that day but by social convention are inclined to ignore it. We’re all told that it’s some totally magnificent experience, but it just isn’t. For me, it wasn’t a victory day. It was ‘you’ve just been released from prison’ day.

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Don’t misunderstand me. I in no way view my college experience as a prison sentence (even though the food we were provided is the same food given to prison inmates). I hope I’ll always look back at college as a great and defining time where I made some friends, learned skills, and prepped myself as best I could for the world. But if there’s one perk to being on the outside of college it’s that your life is no longer so god damn restricted. No more having your fate determined by meaningless standardized test. No more having to pass on adventures because it takes too much time away from your courses, because if you’re doing it right then those courses are your life.

I wasn’t overly ecstatic on graduation day. I took it pretty calmly because I’d seen it so many times before. I watched Senator Chuck Schumer give the same speech (exactly word for word) at four different college commencement ceremonies for family members of mine.
So, by the time it was my turn, it went down like this: The day of my graduation, I wore the same clothes I was wearing on the very first day I started at that university four years earlier. Literally those exact clothes. Jeans and a worn out T-shirt. I figured it was fitting as freed prisoners are given whatever possessions they had on them when they were locked up. I shaved a beard I’d been growing over the semester and I cleaned my car out a bit.

Throughout the duration of the ceremony, I made sure to savior every moment. I listened to every word of every speech even if I’d heard it all before. Then came the end of the ceremony, where they tell you to turn the tassel over to the left side of your cap. The sound of hearing “Class of 2016, you have officially graduated!” was the like hearing the sound of your jail cell open for the last time.

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I walked out of the building into the reception area. There was no great personal sense of accomplishment and I wasn’t expecting there to be. No forced emotions. Just a subtle sense of freedom. Now I could go anywhere or do anything. I took off my cap and gown, shook hands with a couple of people, and then I got the hell outta there. After four years in college I was done. So I got in my car, and drove. No particular direction. No destination. I just drove. Next thing I knew, I was crossing state lines heading east, without any intent, to the coast. Some people thought that I was trying have some spiritual moment of seeing the ocean. I wasn’t. I was just driving and the ocean happened to be in front of me.
Later, I was sitting in a rest stop somewhere in Massachusetts where I had my only truly indelible experience of the day. I was sitting at a table looking around at the other people. I wasn’t wearing my cap and gown and no one knew me, so I could interact with everyone as just another person. For the first time in four years I was a person and not a college student. And it was in that instant I realized I had left college and joined the real world. That moment of humility was worth a lot more to me than spending the day as the center of attention.
But that’s not the point. The point is that looking at your graduation as a release from confinement rather than a coronation saves you from unnecessary disappointment at an otherwise anticlimactic event. If you’re going to go through the motions and celebrate with friends and family, do it because you genuinely want to. Otherwise, don’t be afraid to do what feels natural.