On the Most Normal Way that I Could Leave the Gates of University
Thoughts on graduating in the middle of a pandemic
It was anti-climactic how up to the last moments of my stay in university, I was uncertain whether I was going to leave it or not. There was more anxiety than excitement as I waited for my grade for this one last major to come out.
I wanted to graduate, yes. But as much as I was hopeful and desperate, you can just never be complacent and sure about some things in life. I thought I would have graduated two trimesters ago but that never happened. The world doesn’t stick by our timelines. It has its own. And as I grew up, I have come to terms that regardless if I understand it or not, I will choose to accept it.
Life is unexpected in so many ways, and very recently, I have learned that what you hold dearly, you must hold loosely. Maybe, we think this way to prevent ourselves from getting disappointed when things don’t go as we expected them to. Or maybe holding it dearly didn’t mean holding it close in the first place, but rather holding it freely.
In the same way that I am writing about it now, there are so many things that I had hoped to happen a certain way but didn’t. With all the oddities, and the twists and turns that our society, our species, and our world is going through right now, normal is nowhere to be found. The future that was set in stone — the image of marching up the stage for my graduation ceremony — no matter how much I hoped it to be existent was something never for me to discover nor experience.
Our standards are recalibrating, and our expectations fluctuating. Our hopes are changing, and now more than ever, our environment is unyielding. What was once seemingly understandable and controllable is no longer within the grasp of our knowledge.
There’s a lot of gray areas, a lot of blurred lines, and a surplus of anxiety. As intellectual beings, we struggle in this sudden shift in our environment — in our comfort zones and our safe places. We no longer feel the security of society’s pre-defined systems. People of all ages, origins and competencies are losing their jobs. We are no longer protected by our thoroughly explored, hard-earned, and trusted coping mechanisms. We are further inclined to succumb to the longing and the loneliness that social distancing has brought forth to our tables.
Despite the lack of normality, however, we are never too helpless nor hopeless. Our design was perfected to never phase out — slowly and constantly evolving, thriving, and triumphing. In instability and disarray, our will grows stronger, our focus much sharper, and our vision much clearer. We develop tolerance to a certain degree of confusion, discomfort, and discontent, and use it as the very environment to conquer and better our former selves.
Things may not be the way that they used to be, nor the way that we hoped them to be. But, HERE and NOW are not and will never be the time and place to be defeated. There are no more academic flowcharts to follow, nor retakes for our failures. The real game is just about to start and a normal mode is just not being offered. The game knows we can do better, so it’s skipping all those levels and is bumping us up to meet the big boss.
And suddenly when we see it that way, it doesn’t seem so scary anymore, right?
