It was around Halfway Hall last term that we first became acquainted. You arrived in various guises; creeping up on me as questions of bloodcurdling enormity, implied insinuations amid casual discussions with friends and family about potential careers. Â Each time you were an unsolicited visitor that made it feel as if the ground was sliding and slipping beneath me. You created moments of murky panic, before I flung you back into the furthest peripheries of my mind.
In turn, you morphed into another beast: this time in my inability to focus on the present. I told myself and those around me that ‘I need to think about it’ when confronted with questions about life after university—though I never did think about it. The thought of prolonged reflection filled me with a mixture of existential distress and a hollowing dread.
You are a peculiar nonentity, fed by the looming inevitability of student debt, growing underemployment and the 9 to 5 lifestyle that is only really fun when Dolly Parton sings about it. You seem to thrive on the numerous ‘what ifs’ and ‘did I make the right choice’ fears, coupled with the age-old adage that university is supposed to be the best years of your life, making anything afterwards appear darkened with an expectation of disappointment.
Graduation marks itself as a jarring change: change in occupation, relationships, residence. As a point of severe transition, it is accompanied with a sense of foreseeable loss that you are bolstered by. The familiar structure of Oxford life, with its eight-week terms of binge drinking and deadlines, will be peeled away and replaced with a void I have to fill with cover letters and Skype interviews.
I can already see myself looking back with fond nostalgia on the essay crises I currently abhor, becoming one of the misty eyed alumnus that I have seen return to college. This is the effect you have had on me: my personality is split. I feel as if I am living my second year as both the protagonist and the distant spectator, already feeling like its coming to an end.
Until it does though, I suppose I will accept that you are now a part of this limbo I am in and have been in for nearly two years. This delicious purgatory in between adolescence and adulthood. The change is an inevitability, and it has unfortunately dawned on me that I will have to make an actual decision at some point soon, and hopefully once I do, you will be less of a burden and more of a stimulus to just get on with it.
Once I have survived finals and join the ranks of Oxford graduates, I hope that you will have grown into a nervous exhilaration for what is to come.
Yours sincerely,
Becky Cook
