3B
Wednesday, November 22, 2017 // The Statement 

Empath in the wild: Graduating

R

ecently, a panicky feeling has been 
lingering in the back of my mind. 
I’m entering the last semester of 
my undergraduate education, and I 

don’t know what I want to do when that’s over. 
I, at the very least, know what city I want to be 
in, but I don’t have housing secured and I don’t 
have a job secured. I’ve 
become 
disenchanted 

with my major, English — 
that’s to say, I’ve become 
disenchanted 
with 

literary criticism — and 
I don’t know if I want to 
“be a writer” and what 
that might look like if I 
did.

I’m working through big 

questions like: What does 
it mean to be an artist? 
What does that look like 
for me, outside of school? 
How can I balance my 
own creative endeavors 
with engaging with my 
community? 
How 
will 

I sustain myself? Do I 
want to make a living off 
my writing, or do I want 
writing to be something 
I do outside of work? 
What will I do if I don’t 
write? What is my social 
responsibility 
in 
this 

political climate? These 
questions roll into one 
another and if I spend too 
long thinking about any 
one question, specifically, 
I 
drive 
myself 
crazy 

because I come up with 
so many more questions.

So, last weekend I was 

celebrating my 22nd birthday: I went out to a 
nice dinner on Friday and had friends over to 
celebrate later that night. On Saturday, it was 
really sunny and my boyfriend and I went out 
to brunch, then took a long walk through the 
park and made enchiladas for dinner. It was 
a fantastic weekend — I was surrounded by 
delicious food, people I love and a healthy dose 
of sunshine before the winter hit.

But later that night, my friend and I were 

hanging out and I just sort of burst into tears. 
All the questions I’ve been thinking about 
all semester poured out of me in a general 
frustration and panic about what I was going to 
do and whether anything I did mattered in the 
grand scheme of things, after I graduated from 
college.

I was expecting, from my friend sitting on the 

other end of the couch from me, some assurance 

that I would figure it out, and that I was a really 
determined person who could do whatever I 
wanted to. I wanted my friend to be there with 
me, wallowing in this frustration about not 
liking my major and not knowing what was the 
best thing to do after I graduate — I wanted to 
hear from someone else how hard it is to go out 

into the world.

But this is not the feedback I received. At 

first, I wondered why I wasn’t hearing more 
affirmation. It was only after some of my tears 
dried, after I released almost all my frustrations, 
that my friend started speaking.

Basically, what he told me is that I would be 

fine and I needed to stop wallowing. Barring 
anything extreme happening, I’m going to 
graduate from the University of Michigan with 
a degree, lots of friends and a strong support 
system in my family that will support me if I 
need help. I’m white, and I’m a native English 
speaker. Because of the kind of country we live 
in, all of these things mean, collectively, that 
I’m going to be fine. Sure, maybe I won’t have 
the most fulfilling job ever right out of college. 
Sure, I may feel a little lost for a while. But in the 
grand scheme of things, life is likely going to be 

more than OK for me.

I also received a healthy reminder that, in 

comparison to so many others who live in the 
United States — people who want to go to college 
but haven’t had the opportunity, people who 
immigrated here from another, non-English-
speaking country, people of color and people 

with disabilities — I’m going to 
be fine. As an upper-middle-class 
white woman with lots of friends 
and family close by, I have a lot 
going for me.

My friend also reminded me that 

— although this point is smaller 
in scale than the ones previously 
mentioned — I was in the middle 
of my birthday weekend. I had so 
much to be thankful for and yet 
these individualistic, and kind 
of self-centered questions, were 
preventing me from inhabiting 
the present moment, which had so 
much to offer.

While I think there’s room 

for my individual frustrations 
about the uncertain nature of 
my life after graduation, it’s 
also 
extremely 
important 
to 

maintain 
perspective. 
Being 

stuck in my head prevented me 
from seeing myself as part of a 
larger population of people in 
this country — and ultimately the 
whole world — who don’t have the 
same kinds of opportunities and 
advantages.

Being in my head, preoccupied 

by these individualistic questions, 
kept me from looking outside 
myself to the extent that I wasn’t 
seeing all the amazing things 
happening around me. If I can’t 
fully appreciate a celebratory 

weekend like my birthday, then how could I go 
about empathizing with others on a real level? 
To a certain extent, I think the environment on 
campus facilitates selfish thinking like this. I 
became so future-oriented and so self-centered 
leading up to that night that I couldn’t look 
outside myself.

Since that weekend, I began seeing myself 

as one part of a much larger whole. Instead of 
dwelling on how uncertain my future is, I’ve 
taken concrete steps to appreciate what I have 
in the present: I’ve been doing yoga almost every 
day and reaching out to friends I haven’t talked 
to in a while, since I’ve been too busy trying to 
force myself to “figure things out.” Moving past 
my frustrations about my uncertain future is 
definitely a process, but I can say I already feel 
much better and much more balanced than I did 
a week and a half ago.

BY REGAN DETWILER, COLUMNIST

ILLUSTRATION BY AMELIA CACCHIONE