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It’s 3:30am , my parents are crammed together on the good end of my raggedy bed (I’m downstairs chillin on the couch) and tomorrow or the day after I’m outta here for good
People keep asking me how it feels to have graduated, and like, I dunno, kind of how it feels to be half asleep on the morning of your 18th birthday. But instead of getting to post nudes on the internet you get to be an adult. Not that different, but something’s changed, according to everyone else in the world.
It feels slightly anti-climactic because I don’t feel like anything I’ve done in college has been as stressful as my shithole hell high school. I mean, that’s definitely an overinflated half-memory because last semester I slept 5 hours a night, did two hundred pages of reading a week, wrote 7 essays, took 6 classes, and volunteered and ran a club on top of that. And I spent large chunks of this semester making pro/con lists of tossing myself off the Granville Island bridge, but, god, remember AP classes?
My undergraduate degree has been weird. I mean, it’s probably weird for literally everyone. It’s in my nature to wanna put a little bow on the whole thing and turn it into an Aesop’s fable. Hey Kids Sit Down Lemme Tell You the Story of Why to Not be Nice to Shitty White Boys. That’s one of Aesop’s morals (if you’re reading this I’m probably not talking about you). Another one is me reaching into a pocket dimension Leorio Paradignight Warping Punch style so I can grab the back of my own head and bash my skull against a brick wall yelling “IT’S FINE TO HAVE FEELINGS.”
Here’s other stuff I learned: how to call people out in a way that’s productive, how to cook a beef Bolognese, how to study for an exam, how to do well in a subject you’re bad at, how to ask someone for help, how to politely decline an aggressive tinder message, how to weed out the people who are bad for you (actually extricating them from my life I achieve, but gracelessly), how to achieve clear, clean looking skin (mud, charcoal wrapped in soap, a good moisturizer, beeswax), how to find a flattering lipstick (any of them, bitch!!!), how to cook for fifteen people at once with two hands and six burners, how to host a party, how to sneakily slide vegetables into the bodies of your sweet malnourished friends, how to shit out a twelve page paper in one night (in this order: eat, jerk off, nap, research, write, nap, edit, print, get a 96%), how to slyly insert yourself into new, foreign friend groups, how to embroider, how to kind of get the hang of stuff with a little intuition and determination, how to play first and third person shooters, how to write compelling fiction in second person, how to compose a poem, how to maintain an aesthetic over different seasons and weather patterns, how to talk about capitalism over tea without sounding like a moron, how to fall asleep next to someone who snores, how to accept the two-steps-forward-one-step-back thing, how to find literally anything in the world interesting + worthy of learning (open mind big heart!!), how to differentiate a simple equation, how to work really really really really hard, and how to keep on living when it doesn’t work anyways.
Stuff I didn’t learn: I still spell “woll” instead of “wool” unless I think about it beforehand, I usually forget the word for “opposite of differentiation” and when I draw a supply and demand graph, I have to think really hard about where the P and the Q go (still!!). “Don’t be good to shitty white boys” is something I tell myself maybe every 45 minutes but I do it anyways. I’m still bad with money. I still don’t know how to pay my taxes, or fall asleep without my stuffed animals, or keep my room clean. I’m still bad at caring too much about people who don’t care about me back, or don’t care enough, or in the right way. I’m bad at managing stress, and not letting one bad thing drag me off a cliff. And I’m bad at coming up with fun, quirky, believable excuses for the excess of self-harm scars I got running down my sweet toned calves (last time I just said, “UH, YOU KNOW”). I’m bad at figuring out how to manage relationships that make me uncomfortable without just ghosting them. I’m bad at letting myself be proud or giving myself enough credit. BIame my Chinese Parents and my hell high school for never feeling satisfied. I never learned how to make a good peanut sauce (the trick is measuring? I think? Which is gay and won’t be done). Also, I can’t bake bread for shit. And honestly? Economics? Still not my best subject.
I guess I learned a lot, but I still have a long way to go. Which is good. I like learning. I came to college: wack hair, insecure, bad at school, pure virgin baby blank skin, lazy as shit, no boobs, wildly incompetent, NO EYEBROWS, only 2 lipsticks. I leave college: a cute bob, confidence falling out of my asscrack, tatt’d up, a seasonally hard worker, good at some things, mildly depressed, 2+ lipsticks, no boobs, better clothes, better shoes, better service.
I don’t know what’s coming next but I probably won’t die and it’ll hopefully be in a forward and upward trajectory on average in the long term
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