The Day After the Diploma

by Brigitte Lee, , October 17, 2006

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The phrase, “they don’t prepare you for this” is an understatement. But then again, are we ever prepared for anything that happens? Even if we were to know what our future holds, it’s nearly impossible to truly be ready for anything that comes our way. But this, this is one thing that you really can’t be prepared for. No one talks about it; television dramas don’t cover this dilemma. And if TV doesn’t tell us how to deal with it, then how are we supposed to figure it out?
If you really think about it, the blue box covers everything; love, lust, loss, triumph, defeat, terror, almost always in a pretty little half an hour or maybe hour script. Childhood to old age, most major life events are exposed in every light, angle, character, and bias. But what they don’t expose is the truth, go figure. The truth isn’t going to be fixed in a sitcom about five people in a New York City coffee house, or a drama about 43 people trapped on a deserted island, or in an emergency room, or a college campus, or a four bedroom house, or on the city streets battling crime.
The truth is that once you find yourself at the point of change, altering your lifestyle, dealing with the reality that you now have to start your life, just right here, right on this blank canvas, that really, you have no freaking clue what you’re doing. You don’t know who you are, where you want to go, and who you want to take with you. There is no maybe. Do it or die.
Some hide, and many find a way to retreat to something comfortable. Others take a swan dive into a direction they hope will save them, more than likely to return with maybe a few more memories, but not much wiser. It doesn’t seem to make a difference though. You’re still just running from the inevitable. You’re the stupid blonde they put at the beginning of the horror flick to die off first, to let you know they mean business. Viewer discretion is advised.

But we all land here. At some point, everyone sits down in this chair, stares at this wall and says, “Now, what?” High school is over, and if you were lucky enough to delay life for four more years, so is college. Yeah, you could go to grad school, travel, live in a van, play music, stop voting, stop caring, become a statistic in the over-educated, unemployed genre of most of Middle America’s young adults. But you’re still that stupid blonde, just running. Get it over with already, I hate the drawn out death scene. It’s full of fake blood and a lot of unnecessary screaming.
Blank canvas. I want to start painting. I have this attic, this very large attic in my new apartment, an apartment that I fill with things to make it feel like home. Because I have to feel like I’m at home, or I feel nothing. But this attic is large, with two big windows, and I want it to be my art studio, because I need something for me. Something no one can touch and I can shut to door and lock it and not let anyone in. I want to be Meg Ryan in that movie when she stalks her French ex-boyfriend from her art studio attic, and Matthew Broderick shows up on a moped or something and they fall in love over their angst of their exes getting it on across the street, cue exiting music for a film. Alright, so I don’t want to be Meg Ryan, but I want to paint in the attic is my point.
I want to know what to do with my friends. Keep them? Let them go? Say my goodbyes, thanks for the nice time, good luck with the rest of your life. Make new friends? What are you supposed to do with that? How do you just keep going, like nothing has changed? Like no one is any different than they were before. I mean, you can pretend like that’s the case, but we’d all just be lying to ourselves. Once you finish doing a place, once it ends, you move on, and you keep the memories, and say goodbye to the way things were. Put on some sunglasses if you don’t like the new sunrise, but you can’t stop it from happening.
So, keep talking to the friends, keep up appearances, try and pretend like all of those things that made it go sour didn’t happen. Hold on to the good things, let go of the bad, keep on keeping on. But don’t lie to yourself. God, just don’t do that.
If I buy one jar of every color of paint that was ever made, and set it next a large vase of water and an easel and some blank canvas and a collection of different brushes of different sizes, and sit in front of it, and wait, for like the paint to do something, will it make me feel like a whole person?
I really don’t care, because it’s just another way to say I’m Drew Barrymore, in the kitchen, with the cordless phone.
There isn’t a point that I’m trying to make here. I’m just stating the facts. I’m just trying to prepare you, because no one prepared me. I was too busy worrying about time limits, and deadlines, and my GPA, and my boyfriend, and politics, and global warming, and my life. I was too busy to slow down and realize that I was hurrying up to sit and wait, and feel like a failure. Because that’s all they really are preparing you for, disappointment. The realization that once you’re done being educated, working your ass off, that the pay off doesn’t kick back so quickly. Even if you do get that dream job, it doesn’t fulfill its dream, because now this is it. This is what you do, you work for a living, and that’s it. Get up; drink coffee, traffic, work, lunch, traffic, home. Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
I don’t even drink coffee.
You can call me a pessimist, but I’d call you a dreamer. I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist. Isn’t that what they always say? Maybe they’re always right. Maybe the white picket fence isn’t all its cracked up to be. I don’t really like white things anyway. I’m the one trying to paint blank canvases.
In my new “home” I have all of these tall blank walls that I look at and tremble, because I want to cover them with things so I don’t have to look at the plain bare walls. I don’t want to think my walls are naked for people to stare at all of its imperfections, to analyze its being, its stature. But I can’t bring myself to hang things on it, because what if I change my mind. What if I commit myself to this screw going into this wall, and permanently mark this plain naked wall with a hole that I can never take back? What if I paint something to hang over the hole, and then stare at my own painting, picking it apart, day after day, until I can’t take it anymore and take it down, to stare at the hole, day after day? How could I live with myself?
What if I’m that wall?
But you might be lucky. All of this might not apply to you. You might be able to convince yourself that a purpose is all one needs, and a goal to live for, a dream to hold on to. That the only thing we have is hope. It's a fable that keeps us breathing. White lies aren't meant to help us, they are meant to keep us alive; to keep us searching for the next big thing. You can talk yourself into believing, that everything has a reason, has a place, because it's the only way to rest assured that tomorrow might be better.
I’m sticking with the blank canvas.

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