The Best Time I Actually Graduated From College
I graduated from college today.
I was going to say “it only took me a year,” but of course it took me like twenty-three years. What took a year was bothering to apply for graduation.
It was never unfeasible that I would graduate late, given how much of my undergraduate career I spent avoiding class from other continents. There was an August spent holed up in Sydney with a love I’d met in Budapest, a finals week skipped because I found a cheap flight to Istanbul. It was sometimes mentioned that I didn’t seem concerned with my own success.
When I met with a guidance counselor last year, she frowned at my academic worksheet. There were holes. But my school was big and bureaucratic and it made a point of graduating students in the allotted four years. The guidance counselor made some creative redistributions of credit hours and I was cleared to graduate. I felt frictionless.
Then my dad called. He asked me to come home. He entered hospice care.
He had been sick for a year. I knew it was bad and I probably even knew he was going to die, but death’s imminence was abstract. Everything beyond graduation was hazy, so in that way the prospect of his death was as nebulous as any other fact of adult life.
I left school and took incompletes in all my classes. My professors said I could take my final exams whenever I was ready.
At the hospice house, the nurses treated my brothers and me like mascots, like brave child soldiers. We trooped in with book bags and spread out on the floor. We waited. When I felt too restless to wait, I went shopping for a funeral dress. I bought a high-necked Celine at a vintage store and hid it in the back of my closet.
I went back to school for graduation weekend and got so drunk that I fell, broke my elbow, and had to work my cap and gown around a sling. My dad, briefly lucid, said he hoped I hadn’t spilled my drink on the way down.
After that I went back home. I watched him die.
In June, I got a job as a receptionist at a hair salon. I returned to the house I’d lived in for the past two years with a hermetic oil heiress and her drug dealer. As I told myself and anyone who asked, I needed to live in my college town because I was finishing my classes.
I tanned on my rooftop.
I read Chris Kraus.
I went to a therapist and after our third session sent her an email that I didn’t feel ready to commit to healing.
At some point I wrote: “not so much ‘blocked’ as ‘not really trying’ (though, in fairness, I am also lost about what there is to be trying for.)”
I hardly spoke to anyone.
The oil heiress (who held the lease on the house) texted that she needed me out by August 1. On August 2, I moved my stuff over to my boyfriend’s. I told his roommate I just needed a place to crash while I figured out my next move.
Students came back to school and back to the salon. I felt a part of and apart from them. I started saying my academic status was complicated and settled into the liminal space between having graduated and… not.
I wrote: “I am fielding emails from professors who want things from me & it makes me anxious/murderous. My impulse is to keep listing the same tasks over & over again on different pieces of paper. Actually completing tasks = nauseating.”
Eventually three of my four professors just graded me on the work I’d completed during the semester. I pretended not to know that my fourth class remained Incomplete.
In October I ran over a snake in our driveway the morning after I took my boyfriend to the ER for what turned out to be a panic attack. My boyfriend worried about how he’d pay the medical bills and I became sensitive about reptiles. I imagined being buried under orgies of them. I wrote: “I think hallucinations are the sincerest manifestations of my anxiety.”
In November, I became allergic to a ring I’d been wearing for years and broke out in a gnarly rash. My heart raced for no reason. I needed sleep all the time, never felt like fucking, lost interest in anything other than cold white wine and benzodiazepines. I stopped having to-do lists.
I floated through December.
On the last day of the year I decided I was ready to rejoin the world. In lime green sharpie I scribbled a list of GOALS and taped it across from my bed. Then I put on an emerald eyeshadow and a white fur coat and rang in the new year toasting a pair of belly-dancers.
I spent January high on the novelty of trying. I cooked for myself and bought new cacti. It might’ve been the time to resolve the problem of my diploma, but I was looking obsessively forward. College was the past.
In February, I dipped. I felt the opposite of precocious. I wondered if I would spend my entire life blaming my dad’s death for my failure to launch.
I kept reminding myself that Carine Roitfeld didn’t (really) start her career until she was 36. I kept reminding myself that I had time.
In March, I quit my job. I was sick of the appearance of my life.
Last month, my best friends and I reunited for the youngest of our quartet’s last weekend of college. Rolling, I couldn’t stop confessing that I hadn’t actually graduated. I was a fraud. Of course they already knew: I made this confession every time we did drugs.
I finally felt nauseated enough to deal with my life. I came home and started emailing administrators. I needed one grade, from one professor. The professor was out for surgery. The professor was about to retire. It was complicated, bureaucratic and banal.
Then, today, my professor emailed me back. She sent in a grade, based on the work I’d completed in the spring of 2014, and I graduated.
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