Your New Life Will Cost You Your Old Life: Life After University

Currently, I sit in the weirdest in-between phase of life I have experienced to date. What I mean by this is that I’ve finished my degree, entered the big, wide world, and now I sit in my childhood bedroom waiting for something to magically happen. I’ve found that the big, wide world is pretty much exactly the same world I’ve lived in my entire life. I thought after graduation I would be a fully-fledged adult, my degree in one hand, and a plethora of jobs in the other. Instead, I work in hospitality, and I keep waiting for my life to begin.

I feel like a completely different person from who I was when I originally lived in this town; moving away to university (especially a city) shapes you into a completely different person from who you would be had you not gone. That’s not to say that people who don’t go to university don’t grow and mature, just that you tend to grow in different ways. 

At uni, I met people completely different from myself and my home friends, I experienced living in the north compared to the south, I learned how to cook and do laundry and pay bills on time and that somehow I could manage to buy an extra round at 256 on a Tuesday night whilst still eating the rest of the week. 

I was so proud of the life I had created for myself at university, everything I had built was entirely my own, like something I had perfected and made beautiful. I never stopped to realise that my perfect life had a time limit, but I'm glad I embraced it fully without grieving it then.

Now? I feel like I don’t belong anywhere. If I stayed in Manchester, all my friends have graduated. I came back home and it feels like all my friends have moved on with their lives, buying houses, and creating adult friendship groups I don’t fit into. 

Meanwhile, I spend each night panicking that I’m wasting time, my potential is getting smaller each day, I’m going to work in hospitality forever and my dreams will never come true. Perhaps it’s slightly irrational, but most of the time I feel like time is running out, slipping through my fingers like sand in an hourglass, and I know I’m not the only one.

The pressure to get a graduate job fresh out of university is unbridled and immense- not once have I sat down and felt proud of myself for getting a degree, instead I’ve panicked about getting a job. 

Something I’m starting to realise is that life keeps moving no matter what, but it’s your choice whether you move with it or not. Of course, I don’t fit seamlessly back into my old life now- I made a new one. 

Your new life will cost you your old one. Every time you grow and become someone new, you shed a version of yourself like a snake sheds its skin, constantly evolving and becoming someone new. 

Is it terrifying not knowing if I’ll get a graduate job or make any friends? Absolutely. But it’s also exciting. I feel grateful beyond words to be able to start over again and again, to live through new experiences and the wonder of what’s next. The awe of “Show me how good it can get!”.

If you’re a graduate and you think you’re wasting your life away, take a deep breath and relax. The world is at your fingertips, and it’s never too late to restart. 

I am letting go of my old life, the university me, and embracing graduate me.