Photo by Augustine Francia | Edited by Chubi
They say that college is when everything gets serious. I find this to be true. Although you will not feel it during your freshman year, when you are at the brink of your second year, you start to realise that this is it.
There’s no messing this up. That whatever you are stepping on right now is a step to your future. The rocks you collected are the milestones that would lead the way to something uncertain, incomprehensible, and confusing – and it’s up to you to make sense of what you have collected for yourself. It’s like an abstract painting where you tilt your head sideways and try to understand what the painter is trying to show the onlookers but both the painter and onlooker is you; so you stare. You stare at least somehow it tries to make sense, or at least until you feel satisfied with what you see and feel despite not being able to understand the painting entirely. Anyhow, you can still stare back at it.
Now, graduation makes one fidget. It’s the kind of fidget that you want to hide from everybody, scared that maybe they’ll judge. Scared that maybe it’ll show that you cannot keep your crap together. But the thing is, everybody fidgets. It’s not just you. You are all scared together. Some people just know how to hide it better. Graduation is the ceremony that lets you know you’re evicted from the safety net – that It’s time to face the harsh reality of the economy and society we live in – a society ruled by people that makes you question why on earth were you put in this world only to be governed by them. And it makes you feel even more scared.
When you are not privileged enough to have an assurance that whatever you do, you’ll fare well, you fidget. I believe it’s normal considering the society we live in has almost always proved that it’s not always about hard work. More often than not, it’s almost always about the privileges you have within your reach.
So there’s always these resounding questions that you ask yourself: Will I get on easily with this transition? Will I find a job that makes me happy? Will I overwork myself as I do my best to prove my worth? Will I achieve the life I pictured out for myself considering the country I live in? Will I be able to feed myself, build my own family, and be stable? Will I even be stable? Will I ever truly make it?
But then you’re at the point of no return. When you’re at the point of no return, you look back on your journey and see how far you’ve come, and then you look ahead and see how far you still are from whatever goals you set for yourself. Then it makes you think and rethink what you really want to do. Who you want to be, where you want to be, in a way that it pressures you to make what you want define who you are as a person. So despite the doubts, the overthinking, the confusion, and the fear, you try. There is really no other way to face this unforgiving world but to try and face every challenge head-on.
So, to my dear fellow future unemployed graduates: try. Try to apply for that job. Try to take that opportunity despite your fear that you are not good enough for it. Try to be better. Soon, you’ll see how much you’ve grown because you tried. You may fail trying but that’s not really a failure, is it? The lesson you learned from that experience is a gain that cannot be taken from you. So try. And may God bless all of our future endeavours.#NoViscanLeftBehind