For the last seventeen years, I have been a student first and foremost, defined in large part by the school I attended, for better or worse. I filled out applications for jobs, apartments, surveys, etc. all with student as my profession, even in the later years - which is to say the last four months - of my time at NYU. And though years of schooling were always a means to an end, that end was typically, more schooling. But now, I face knowing what I pretended to always know - that unless I decide upon grad school (and, okay, I haven't ruled it out, but for the sake of this discussion let's say I'm not going), this all-important phase of my life is totally finished. I am now set to embark upon a totally new phase of my life, one with which my experience/familiarity/comfort level amounts to absolutely zero.
I told myself that I was going to take this week off. Goals include: sleeping, eating, doing absolutely nothing. Rationally, it made sense - when, on Saturday, almost all of my coworkers remarked on how tired I looked, I realized that I was. It's as if I've been running a dead sprint and only just stopped moving on Saturday. This dead sprint had been happening since January. And while I covered a lot of ground in my marathon (I'm mixing my running metaphors, but I don't run, so I feel like it's okay), that's a long-ass time to keep running. So this week was for staying away from Craigslist (for jobs - guiltily searching for new apartments allowed), resisting the urge to look at Backstage, not creating a to-do list.
I'm not, as it turns out, terribly good at this. I say as it turns out as if I didn't know this, but I have of course known this fact for most of my young life. Still this time it feels different - there's always an adjustment period to the summer, but I think it's the knowledge that this is not a temporary break from my ordinary schedule, rather that I have to adjust to this being my new schedule.
Weeeeeeeird.
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