The number one piece of advice I got upon graduation was to prepare myself for the weirdness that is post-grad life. No one told me specifically what I should be worried about, but rather that I should “enjoy college while you can”. So the extent to which this was actually helpful was debatable, but I knew exactly what “weirdness” they were talking about as I proceeded to take my first office job just a month after graduation. Here are a few things I wish people had warned me about first:

1. The Grind

For the first few months of work you will face exhaustion. Utter, crippling, debilitating exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that makes you wonder if you will ever recover. Sitting in a chair and staring at a screen suddenly becomes the most physically and mentally demanding task you could face. Abiding by the normal work day hours ravages your body. Come 5:00 p.m. on a work day, your legs are made of cement and the light at the end of the tunnel is your bed. No longer are the days where you can sneak in a midday slumber to be rested up for that bar crawl on a Tuesday night. Or maybe skip your responsibilities altogether. You are now accountable for your work and people are depending on you, when in reality all you really want to do is return to when your life was waking up at 11:20 a.m. for your 11:30 Flower Arrangement class and calling it a day.

2. The Work Friendship

One thing I have yet to understand is how a work friendship functions. Once you begin to make yourself comfortable with the group you got hired with, you realize “Hey, I might even like some of these people”. They are not just those people who you once had to force excruciating conversation with; these are people you might even want to see outside of work. Despite this, there’s a threshold of work friendship rules that you must pass before regular friendship rules apply. I say this because I attack people with my friendship. But you cannot aggressively pursue a friendship with a colleague by revealing way too much information at a work social or terrify that poor soul into the corner of his already claustrophobic cubicle. Whether or not you like it, you are all there to work first and then maybe become friends. If for some reason your prey decides he or she likes you too despite your horrendous lack of awareness for boundaries, then just maybe you have a friendship that is more than just a work friendship.

3. The Distance

As a person whose relationship status with her friends is “basically engaged,” I took full advantage of our close proximity on campus. There’s nothing more comforting than knowing all your best friends are within a five minute distance away. On the flip side, there’s also nothing more devastatingly depressing than knowing this will be the last time that’ll ever happen. Unless you are like me and planning on living in the same care center with your bestie when you are 95 years old. Then you can look forward to that. But if not, you will most likely be separated from your friends either by a long car drive or maybe even a plane ride. Even when you are only a car ride away, you start having to plan hangouts weeks in advance because now you are an adult and need to spend the evenings buying groceries or paying for taxes or learning what a mortgage is. Or maybe reserving that spot in the care center in Florida so they are ready for when you and your bff parade in, in 70 years.

4. The “What The Hell Am I Doing?”

By far the most distressing part of working is realizing that you not only have no idea what you are doing at your job, but even less of an idea of what you are doing with your life. Every day at the office is an existential crisis of trying to understand what you do at work and how this fits into the grand scheme of who you are and how you are individually going to change the world. Before you know it, at every lunch break you are planning every day of the next 10 years of your life, contingent on very specific things happening that you ultimately have no control over. You are either perusing LinkedIn for a job you don’t know if you want, signing up for GRE for a degree you haven’t decided, or you signed up for an absurdly expensive yoga retreat to pay for your problems after which you will do the before mentioned things.

5. The Apprentice

There’s a sense of pride associated with that last year of college. It took four years for you to earn your status on campus after coming to college as a freshman with a three ringed binder for every class and gulping jungle juice like it was actually juice. By senior year, you see your crew on every street, you maybe became friends with a professor who’s now all too willing to tell you personal information, and you and your boss drink wine regularly at work. It may have been a lengthy process, but by the end you own your campus. This fiction of perfection shatters when you walk into work and realize you know nothing and everyone around you knows you know nothing and knows all the things you know nothing about. They are at least several years older than you, are maybe married with kids, and carry a facade of “I know what I’m doing with my life” as you stare at Excel and hate yourself for putting “proficient” on your resume. In every phase of life, you have to start from the bottom and slowly drag yourself up. So get used to it bud.

6. The Confusion When It Starts To Click

All of a sudden your manager will ask you to do something and just as you are about to remind her that you are a lowly recent college grad with no handle on the world, you realize you actually know how to do that thing. Random floating bits of information that once felt like a foreign language are starting to become your mantra and you can proudly announce to the office you do in fact know how to use a conference phone and can maybe figure out how to use the coffee machine in the break room. Baby steps.

So let me be the first one to tell you that your first office job out of college will not be a smooth transition. It will be comically tragic at best. Naps are replaced with responsibilities that you actually can’t ignore. Bar crawls are replaced with a 9:00 p.m. bedtime (or is that just me). But what would life be if it wasn’t a clusterfuck of occasionally rewarding and enlightening experiences. To clarify, I am still at the “What the Hell Am I Doing” phase most of the time. But one thing I am certain of is that if you were able to graduate college after having started with a lanyard around your neck and a campus map in hand, you can do this too.