By Alex Rake (The Cascade) – Email
Graduation approaches. Are you afraid? Because I’m afraid. Of course there’s always going to be something scary about entering a new phase of life, but that’s not what freaks me out. In fact, that particular scariness excites me. What I fear is that, after this university thing is all over, I might discover that I’m actually a loser.
I’m afraid I’m not good at what I studied. I’m an English major, and I’ve had plays performed and poems published, and I’ve received awards while working at this newspaper, and sometimes I get As in my classes. But I’ve also been rejected and rejected and rejected again, and sometimes I get Cs. How can I make a career out of writing if my reception is so inconsistent? And I know for a fact that my stuff could be absolute trash and somebody will still like it, because people are weird. How can you know you’re good without fishing for criticism? How can I sell myself as a skilled writer if my writing is so capable of rubbing people the wrong way? I fear I might have to get a job in some area that won’t take advantage of my skills and interests in order to survive, which is exactly the life all the novels I studied taught me to avoid.
I’m afraid I’m under-prepared for fending for myself. Both of my jobs at The Cascade and the library depend on my enrollment in a university program; once I’ve graduated, they can’t use me. So immediately I am faced with a quest for a new job that will pay for rent, food, phone, and all that stuff the modern person needs in order to exist. In movies, university is made out to be the one thing students do, but in reality there’s not enough time to focus on just studies because in order to pay for those studies a person needs a nearly full-time job. Their studies then suffer because of the time that one has to dedicate to their job. Being out of university with as-good-as-they-can-be grades and no job, I have no idea what employer is going to give a shit about what I’ve supposedly accomplished in the last five years in a time where paying for things like copy-editing and poetry seems absurd to many consumers.
I’m especially afraid that I’m losing an excuse. I explain away my constant exhaustion as being the result of working two jobs in two different cities while carless and going to school full-time. You can’t expect me to get anything done in a timely manner while living such a life! But what if, when school is no longer an issue, I discover that I’m actually just lazy? There are times I know I could get something important — like my taxes or my driver’s licence — done but I opt instead to fall asleep to Netflix with half of a pizza on my chest. I have no way of knowing if that kind of decision is a move against stress or a move against responsibility until my schedule gets less demanding.
So I’m afraid that, after all my work here, I’ll turn out to be just another loser with a liberal arts degree, having to justify to the blue-collar corner of my family what all the money and time I spent was actually supposed to grant me, now that I’m living jobless in my parents’ basement, besides some vaporous “experience” and a lot of stress-related physical and mental health issues.
Then again, I know that kind of rhetoric is bullshit produced against the way employment-specific post-secondary education is advertised. There are people out there who need people to write and edit and organize content in an interesting, digestible way. Of course there are, and of course I can do that for them. I will put in the work to find them; I’m going to eat, dammit. But I write this not because my rational brain knows that my skills are useful and important, but because my emotional brain knows there are others who feel the same fears when they sit down and think about what they’re doing with their lives.
Know that you aren’t alone. You are afraid of being a loser, but so what? Life continues and so will you, probably.
