The Unease of a Post Grad Student
Those congratulations after graduating sang tunes of happiness, yet all I could hear was this numbing ring of unease.
I wrote this in the summer of 2019 upon graduating from uni. At the time, I felt this gnawing sense of unease, an unease that began to creep up weeks prior to the ceremony and thus exploded the night after I said goodbye to my friends and family who took the drive to Austin, Texas to celebrate my “accomplishment”. That night I had a breakdown. One that I still am not comfortable divulging on and one that I did not fully understand at the time, and yet, upon moving into my sister’s place for the summer in Richardson, Texas, this isolated breakdown became… reoccurring breakdowns throughout the summer. Only until I took the time to do some much-needed reflection (resulting in this prose), did I come to understand the anxieties I was internalizing those past few months. By no means am I a poet, so don’t come for me — I just needed a medium to express how I felt as I am the queen of submerging my emotions into a metaphorical vault that results in the vault’s subsequent explosion after months of a lack of decompression.
The unease of a post-grad student: limbo.
The atmosphere is vast, vacant, empty.
You’re alone.
Floating about, peacefully.
Half here, half went away.
It’s quite nice, almost aquatic…
blissful.
The floor has met your body, you’ve found footing..? beneath you.
Oh, this is a void.
There is a change in ambiance.
…a sensation arises…
It’s tight with cool undertones.
It’s unfamiliar.
Slowly, something creeps from behind, beginning to enclose around you.
It tightens further, nigh, as grips at your chest and neck, your breath surrenders to its grasp.
Invisible to the eye, it expands slowly, consuming the space surrounding you. You feel it gorging on your reality, constricting your chest and airways. Projecting a ghastly thick noise.
That peaceful bliss has eroded.
This unwelcome sensation is now omnipresent.
You fall, submitting to its authority.
A mere child amongst a god.
I’m at a point where I see myself standing in a void. I turn around and there’s nothing behind me anymore. And I’m saddened by this, and so I look ahead and find whiteness. A gleaming beam of whiteness. The hymn of “uncharted opportunities”.
The sensation arises.
Ahead of me lies adulthood. Marriage, children, grandchildren, death.
Those congratulations after graduating sang tunes of happiness, yet all I could hear was a numbing ring of unease… an unease that I have come to understand to be the song of limbo.
This chapter that I’ve become familiar with and comfortable with, my adolescence, university, it is over… it’s now all gone.
This is the unease of a post-grad student.
It’s now March 1st, 2020.
I feel better, yet, this unease revisits from time to time. I’m no longer in Texas or the US for the matter as I returned to France in the fall of 2019. I had hopes that upon my departure, this feeling would be left in Texas, trapped in my seafoam green storage chest of belongings I keep in my mother’s apartment.
It didn’t.
I’ve always dealt with a variety of “personality defects” that surfaced in my late teens and early twenties. This unease, however, is fairly new as the “personality defects” I’ve wrestled with in the past were cumulations of the stress of life as a student and balancing a bit of the party lifestyle that comes with being a student (especially a bright-eyed, incredulously naive student in Austin, Texas.)
but… I can say that I feel better…
Again, this unease revisits, (it’s actually with me right now, say hello!) although I’m finding that this particular unease is coupled with hints of loneliness and something else I can’t seem to define just yet.
However, just as I did in that July of 2019, I’m acknowledging it. And I’m utilizing a medium (no pun intended) to properly access how I feel.
All is well.
All will be well.
I guess if there’s any takeaway from you reading this post, its “take the time to access how you feel as our brains are sensitive little guys that need some love too.”
I hope this helps in some way. :) Sorry for my sh*t prose.
