For the past two years, I’ve told people that I’m “almost done with school” or “hopefully graduating.” Whenever I said either of those things, my voice was tinged with excitement and restlessness, despite the fact that my graduation kept getting pushed back further and further. Now that I’m actually (for real this time) about to graduate, I almost find myself dreading my last day of classes.
It’s been about a month and a half since I’ve had the time to sit down and write a blog post, but so much has been happening in my life, both personal and spiritual, in that time. Part of the reason why I haven’t written in awhile is that I have fallen plague to several bouts of writer’s block, but the main reason is that life has just been bombarding me with opportunity upon opportunity, and plenty of reality checks in between. Most of my time has been spent trying to sort everything out, and I figured this blog post would be a good way to process everything that’s been going on – I apologize if this ends up being a hodgepodge of odds and ends, and ends up not making any sense. But here I go.
I celebrated my 22nd birthday this past weekend, and before anyone asks, yes, I had Taylor Swift’s “22” stuck in my head pretty much all day. Taylor perfectly sums up every conflicting emotion about being in your early twenties in the lyric, “We’re happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time,” and I’m sure that line will perpetually be echoing in my head over the next year as I go through more and more experiences. All jokes aside, I do feel like I’ve learned plenty of valuable life lessons over the past 22 years, both within the walls of a classroom and outside among the seas of happy, free, confused, and lonely people of the world. On my birthday, I sat down and listed some of the outstanding things I’ve learned over my 22 years of life.
As soon as I moved out on my own a few months ago, I prepared myself for the onslaught of “grown up” responsibilities – cutting rent and utility checks every month, tightening my budget, paying credit card bills, et cetera. I was prepared for these monetary related responsibilities, but I never expected the opportunities and experiences that would come about that would slap me in the face with adulthood.
For those of you who don’t know, on March 15 of this year, I signed the lease to rent a room in a house in Pomona, and about a week later, I officially left the Glendora nest and moved into my new place. Since moving out, I have been noticing little things here and there about living on my own that remind me about how much of a full-fledged adult I’m suddenly starting to become (* doubles over and sobs into a corner*).
Another school year is coming to a close, which for many people my age means that it’s high time to start looking for jobs. The actual process of applying for jobs – editing your resume, typing and retyping cover letters, filling out applications that basically ask for the information that you already provided on your resume, etc. – can be profoundly tiresome as you fight every urge of retreating to Netflix and calling it a day. And then the waiting game begins. And then by some miracle, out of the dozens of applications you have submitted, you manage to get one interview. You’re elated, ecstatic that there is at least one employer, one beacon of hope, out there that is willing to give you a chance to prove yourself worthy of an entry level position. And then it hits you – what if this interview goes awry? Will anyone else call you back? Will you have to go back to square one and keep submitting your edited-to-death-resume to more and more companies? What if no one hires you? Your entire future is riding on this one interview, and you can’t help but feel a little more than mildly overwhelmed with the whole situation. As someone who has sat on both sides of the interview, these are a few things I have learned over the past few years that should be remembered before, during, and after an interview.
As children, the idea of growing up seems like the most exciting thing in the world. We were always told things like “you’ll understand when you’re older” and bombarded by images of fun activities that we were told only grown ups could do. We thought Peter Pan was out of his mind for never wanting to grow up. But as every year passes by and we get older and older, we start to understand where Peter was coming from, never wanting to grow up.
tête-à-tête 