Each night this week I’ve been jolted from my sleep just to stare at the ceiling, wonder what time it is, where my weighted blanket has gone, and how it is that I am graduating in three months with no future plans.
Up to this point, uncertainty about the future has had inconsequential effects on my life. I can stay in my dorm if I do not have spring break plans and I can go home and watch my skin sizzle in the sun if I do not have summer plans. I’ve been reassured that no matter what, school will come around the corner and save me from uncertainty.
But now that the end of college is approaching, the fear of uncertainty has gripped me with its teeth. The jokes that I used to tell no longer want to be told. The voice that I usually write in has disappeared. The phone calls with my parents have been reduced to a singular, fearful thought in the back of my mind — the thought that I still do not have a job and have no clue what I will be doing after I graduate.
This rang especially true on Tuesday, April 8 when my friend texted me that the career fair was happening later that morning. After I saw this text, I contemplated whether or not I should go to the career fair until I decided to print 10 resumes that were good enough for the career fair and change into clothes that make sense for the career fair.
I walked to the career fair and once I arrived I discovered that there were 57 employers, three water stations, one printer for resumes, a student check-in, an employer check-in and four emergency exits. I ignored most of this information and started at the student check-in where I was given a name tag and wrote only my first name in boldface letters. I then left the check-in table and proceeded into the room.
After talking to a couple of highly respectable employers, I decided to go to the Amazon table. After being at the Amazon table for only fifteen seconds, I began to wish that I was no longer at the Amazon table. There was nothing about the people at the Amazon table indicating that they wanted to hire someone like me, someone who studies English. But nonetheless I decided to talk to the people at the Amazon table. During the first fifteen seconds, they asked me what I wanted to do after graduation. I admitted that I want to be a writer and subsequently a man wearing a heather gray Amazon hoodie took to my life with a pen, cutting something here, patching something there, and by the end of my consultation with him I could finally visualize myself graduating from Stanford with a degree in computer science and a return offer to work at Amazon. I had no ambition to write. Instead, I was a software engineer with a big salary and an apartment leased for a year in a building called “The Baxter” above a Whole Foods and across the street from an Orange Theory.
The fantasy only lasted a little while until the man shifted to a sympathetic tone and suggested that I take an Amazon-branded plastic cup before I leave — plenty of them, not only for me, but also for my roommates. As if I might never have the opportunity to take home an Amazon-branded plastic cup again. So I took home the plastic cups, just like I took home a Titleist golf ball from the J.P. Morgan table, and just like I took home a newfound truth that I discovered at the career fair. The truth that I had betrayed myself.
When I applied to Stanford, I applied as an economics major because I thought studying economics would help me get a job in business. But I interned in business after my freshman year and decided that working in business wasn’t for me. I became a product design major my sophomore year because I thought product design would prepare me for a career in entrepreneurship. But the Product Realization Lab made me miserable and I dreaded going to class. By the end of my sophomore year, I was left disaffected and uninspired. I needed a change from the rigidity of life in Silicon Valley, so I moved to Israel for the summer.
In Israel, I spent my mornings working as a shopkeeper at a poetry center and afternoons swimming in the Mediterranean. During a heat wave in August, I was helping set up the poetry center for a puppet show we hosted for local kids. As families trickled in, I couldn’t help but register where I was then compared with the previous summer. I thought about the glass skyscraper I had worked in on W 33rd St. in Midtown Manhattan — how proud I was of myself to finally have my own cubicle and a badge with my picture on it. And when I looked around at the poetry center, I saw none of that. I told myself I was meant to do more serious work than I was doing — work that didn’t involve wooden puppets and three hour workdays. So I made a deal with myself at that moment. A deal that I’d return to my normal self as soon as the summer ended — the self who majored in something responsible and interned in business.
The truth of the matter is that I broke this promise as soon as I returned to America. I declared my major as English, and I began to ignore the interviews, networking, and job application deadlines that surrounded me.
A joy for life that I hadn’t experienced since childhood returned to my body. I began spending my days reading novels and writing my own poetry. For the first time in my memory, I had been true to myself — no longer beholden to the pre-professional expectations I used to set for myself. But this joy is fickle, and I’ve watched it dissipate in the recent weeks as my plans for the future remain uncertain. I’ve begun to lose sleep, skip workouts and call out sick for obligations. And as I mentioned, I even found myself leaving the career fair on Tuesday, April 8 — Titleist golf ball and Amazon cups in hand — in complete betrayal of myself (a writer) visualizing what life would be like now if I had a corporate job offer waiting for me after college instead of an empty horizon.
It’s taken me a while to realize that the real villain here is not the career fair, or any of the companies that were at the career fair. The real villain is my own fear of uncertainty. It’s this same fear that has caused me to betray my interests time after time and leave me emotionally stranded in places I do not belong — like economics lectures, the Product Realization Lab, and the career fair. This wasn’t all in vain. In fact, I learned the most about myself by trying different majors and jobs, failing everything until I finally found English.
Failure is easy to glorify in retrospect. Failure sucks when you’re going through it, and it feels especially palpable right this moment when nothing feels guaranteed anymore. I wish I had a solution. Unfortunately, I’m not a deity, and I can’t prescribe sedatives for the pain. But as I become less avoidant and more vigilant in my own life, I’ve located solace in the fact that fear, anxiety and uncertainty are the three things that I can actually rely on at a time when everything else no longer makes any sense at all.