That Post Uni Crisis

Uni is the best time of your life: you’re getting drunk on a daily basis; all of your best friends are a short walk away and you’re achieving just by being there. Really there is no better stage in your life. You’re in this weird mid-section between not being a child and living at home anymore but not quite living in the real world either. You believe with all your heart that you will go into a career in your chosen field and you will be the most successful human being ever. Oh honey no. The adrenaline of graduation day comes and goes and then you’re back to reality with a bump. Where you really understand just how much you get taxed, a job is the only thing that will be giving you money and deciding whether or not you can continue to live with your parents is your first big decision. That’s before you even start thinking about the ever-sparse jobs market and how your chosen career gives you absolutely no financial support at all. Nada.

Graduation Party 2017

 I finished my actual degree back in 2017. To be fair my post Uni experience started off reasonably okay; I knew I wanted to get into dance teaching so decided to postpone real life and begin a PGCE dance. That did not go successfully. At all. But I think that’s a whole separate blog post of trauma for you all. So, after leaving my PGCE in June 2018 I felt at a real loss as to what I wanted to do with my life. I hadn’t got my PGCE qualification and my plans to go into teaching had been ruined. I stayed in my University town that Summer with my boyfriend as we worked out our next tentative steps in adulthood.

Working at Fat Face

He decided he was going to move to London and pursue his acting career which he’d been planning to do since we’d met. I figured my best move was to move back home and consider my next steps; so in August I made my way back to my sleepy home town. I’d managed to transfer locations from my job in my University town to somewhere closer to home. Fat Face were a great shop to work for and I enjoyed just spending my days organising clothes and helping clients make purchases. But this shop was in a very quiet garden centre and we had about one customer every two hours so the days were going quite slowly and they could only offer me 8 hours a week which was not enough to start building up savings on. That’s when I realised, I needed to find something else. I was travelling into London frequently to see my boyfriend and take dance classes; my confidence had been massively knocked after my PGCE so I was still trying to work out if I wanted to pursue a career in dance or not. My boyfriend spoke about me moving in and it seemed like the perfect time after Christmas to start looking for jobs in London. Eventually I got hired by Lush and I could make my move.

I think when you’re at Uni you believe your life is going to work out one way and you can make so many plans for that final destination; but life is always bound to throw things up at you and send you on different paths. I never thought I would be working in managerial roles in the Health and Beauty industry like I am now; but that’s just where my life seems to have taken me at this current point in time. I know dance is something I will always want to do but it’s had to be something put on the backburner until it’s financially viable for me to do. I think that’s one of the hardest things after Uni where you have to work to afford to live and forget about actually living sometimes.

One of our many garden parties in London

Drifting away from my Uni friends has always been difficult. It’s so easy to stay in touch with people when you just have to go upstairs and knock on someone’s door to have a conversation with them. But when you live at different ends of the country and everyone’s personal lives have gotten a bit intense you find yourself forgetting to reply or just forgetting to check in every now and then. Distance does become your worst enemy. I’ve found loneliness to be something I’ve really struggled with in the last two years; anxiety has made it challenging for me to reach out to people for fear of being rejected. I began to think because we’d all moved on from our Uni lives that people would have moved on from being my friend too. I know now how negative it is to think that way and it’s so important to try and force yourself to make the effort; I love it when I get messages I’m not expecting from old friends so why wouldn’t they?

Does anything beat the joy of a boxing day walk with your family?

It feels like you have to take big steps quite quickly when you’ve finished your degree. Picking a place to unpack all your old fancy dress items and weird assortment of crockery is the hardest. Then deciding if home home is really where the heart is or if you’re ready to spread your wings; move in with your friends or a partner. Paying rent and council tax leaving your old life behind and trying to find out who you really are in your twenties is pretty terrifying and the perils of adulthood seem incredibly relentless. But if you surround yourself with people who really care about you and who will guide you in the right direction; you’ll always have a safety net underneath you. Honestly these last two years have taught me more than anything I learnt while I was studying; I've learnt what kind of person I am, what I'm willing to tolerate and that although I may not have achieved all of my goals yet that I am strong enough to get myself to wherever I want to be in life. Two years of ups and downs that I would definitely refer to as somewhat of a quarter life crisis; but we're all getting there, and we're getting there at our own pace. I am so proud of all the things I've achieved in the last two years even though they haven't led me to my main goal of dance teaching yet. I've moved to the city, I managed a shop on Oxford Street, I paid rent on a flat with my boyfriend, I've made incredible memories with my family and friends and the person I've grown into is someone I'm really happy to know.

So, if you take anything from this blog post just remember that whatever it is it will be okay and you will get through it. You may feel like your life is a bit of a mess but remember that you're not the mess. Let me know what you think and how you coped with the post Uni transition period!