Here’s the truth about the real world, from the perspective of a twenty-one-year-old girl on the brink of college graduation: The real world is scary as hell. Literally. The prospect of my future scares me almost as much as the idea of me being damned to hell someday does.
I’ve been hiding behind deadlines and laughs and fatigue for months to mask the fact that I’ve been terrified to graduate basically this whole year. My 2017 has been filled with my chugging along to one destination only—finishing school.
I should not be graduating. I don’t know how to live in the real world. I don’t answer phone calls from numbers I don’t know because I hate talking to strangers; I don’t make phone calls for the same reason. My mother still makes my appointments, which should embarrass me enough to do it on my own, but it doesn’t. I have a massive amount of social anxiety, and talking on the phone is number one on my list of things that trigger said anxiety. Large crowds are number two. Public speaking is third. College has been a heck of a hurdle for me over the years.
I don’t like confrontation. I don’t even really like people. I can work well with others, but only after I know them and feel comfortable enough around them that I can start to act like a human being, and not some robotic freak who listens to music all day because she doesn’t know what to say to everyone around her, even though she filters through ten different possible conversations in her head at the same time.
I don’t know how I’m going to make it in the real world because every time I try something new, my love and passion for it fades out within a few months. For example, this summer I decided to start selling healthcare products through a company that specializes in residual income. It’s a huge market right now, and it’s a wonderful company, but I knew if I started it I’d eventually grow tired of it because that’s just how I am. And that’s exactly what has happened.
I have a really bad problem of giving up on things. I give up on people, jobs, movies, foods, fads, diets, exercising—everything. I devote so much time to these things for a certain amount of months, and then it just kind of fizzles out until I’m done with it completely.
This is why I’m so worried about getting a job. I’m afraid once I get one, I’ll love it and then hate it in three months and then be stuck with it and hate my life. I’m afraid of commitment and I’m afraid of making choices because I know that with each choice I make, I’m losing out on about a hundred different options, and I’m so aware of my limited time here on earth that I feel paralyzed to make any kind of decision on my own.
My whole life, school has been the only thing I was sure about because it was societally required of me. But now, that’s almost over. I will no longer be required to go to school because of the government or my family’s casual desires or society’s general standards. For the first time in my life, my time is entirely my own and I’ve never been more scared. The freedom of it all is stifling me because I don’t have a clue what to decide. So I haven't decided anything, and I’m so scared that I’ll never decide anything, and that I’ll just be a bum for the rest of my life, a joke, an afterthought, while all my friends succeed in life because they have a definitive plan for their degrees. I don’t—I just want to write, and I want money to somehow fall into my lap, but I don’t want to get a job. Because I have no idea what kind of a job to get.
This is my real world. I’m so caught up in my head, my heart, my family, my world, that the real world is like a boa constricting itself around me, squeezing all the breath from my body until I’m gasping for air, for a reprieve, for something to come and rescue me. And I think that’s ultimately what I’ve been waiting for—for someone or something, be that a man, a publisher, or God himself to come and rescue me from myself, to save me from making a decision at all. I want to be saved by someone so I don’t have to make my own fate, but rather accept the one that’s handed to me because that’s how I’ve lived my entire life.
From the time I was five years old, life has doled out fate onto me, and I’ve had to learn how to deal with whatever that entailed. At this point, I’m an expert in dealing with life. But now that I’m waiting for a new fate to land in my hands, a new path to open that I’ll either jog or crawl down, fate seems to be giving me a break, and I don’t know how to handle it at all.
I know the real world is some ambiguous concept that adults try to scare young people with so they’ll get motivated to find a job and get money so they don’t end up living paycheck to paycheck like most of their parents do. I know that concept is useless because the real world is simply the lives that we lead every day. But the real debt and the real decisions and the real fear that are associated with that “real world” are as real as the adults say, and facing that down is not easy or beautiful or metamorphic—it’s appropriately terrifying, and it’s the realest thing I’ve ever felt.
Mollee graduated from Indiana Wesleyan University in December of 2017 with a Bachelors degree in Writing and English. Currently living in Bloomington, IN, she enjoys writing, binging Netflix shows, and reading everything she can in her spare time. She hopes to become a novelist someday.