With fall right around the corner and bouquets of sharpened pencils entering store front windows across the country, I’ve been reflecting on my former back-to-school anxiety. In the past few years, every time I’d go to a big box store and see the rows of highlighters and spiral-bound notebooks, I’d unconsciously wonder what supplies I needed for my nonexistent upcoming classes. But this August all I have felt is the assurance that summer ends on Labor Day, and the f-word can keep its pumpkin spice until then.
When I was living in Chicago, I got happy hour drinks with a girl I’d met through Instagram. We’d both been going to the legendary Friday Morning Swim Club in Montrose and after some back and forth dm-ing, we went to Hub 51 for margaritas. She had just graduated from Michigan and moved downtown. It was that day when she told me about her post-grad philosophy: the four years after you graduate are your freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years of adulthood. Today, that means I just graduated into full-fledged adulthood this spring. I am officially post-post-grad.
As a newly minted big-time adult there are a few things that I am admittedly better at than I was four years ago, grocery shopping and budgeting being top of that list. As a chronically sentimental person, any time of transition is an opportunity to reflect on where I’ve been and where I’m going.
Four years ago, the first month after I graduated college was perhaps the most depressed and lost I have ever felt in my life. The start of my so-called freshman year of adulthood was off to a rough start. After I successfully moved to Chicago, things started to settle. I got a job, developed a routine, a commute, learned to cook more recipes, had a reasonable bedtime and used any grad money I’d gotten to pay my first few months’ rent.
There were certainly similarities to my freshman year of college. I stayed in too often and said yes too little. I struggled to live with a roommate. I visited churches I didn’t like until I found one that I did. I rarely talked to any boys. In fact, my freshman year of adulthood was a year of intentional singleness, and now I am coming up on one year of marriage.
Looking back, my first friends in college by and large have become people I just follow on social media. That’s true of my first friends in Chicago post-grad, too. Adult friendship was certainly my minor, if not my major, these past four years of adulthood. Proximity becomes a much bigger factor than when you’re living in the dorms. My college and high school friendships had to become stronger to survive the fiery trenches of summers and semesters apart, something my adult friendships have never been tested by.
As a fresh adult, I’d felt so lost and sad. It felt like the consequences of all the decisions they made us make at eighteen-years-old were finally landing and I couldn’t go back and change them now. It was that first year post-grad when I read The Defining Decade by Meg Jay. In it, she writes, “The future isn’t written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do. You are deciding your life right now.”
These past four years of “adulting” have been an investment, not an audition. It has been my real life all along and it deserves the weight that comes with. Like college, I changed a lot between my freshman and senior years of adulthood. I got a job, I got a promotion, I quit that job and got a different one, plus another promotion. I moved across the country then back again. I learned to say yes more and take advantage of the cities where I lived. I learned to stop being paralyzed with the fear that I could do anything and decided to just do something. This is perhaps the best lesson I’d like to share with my twenty-two-year-old self: just do something.
Carlisle Patete (‘22) came to Calvin University from the mountains of North Carolina and graduated with a double major in film & media and creative writing. After brief stints in Los Angeles and Chicago, she now resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she enjoys sweet tea on her front porch and identifying every tree and bird she runs into on any hiking trail.
