So... what now?

Before I begin, I’d like to solicit your help, dear readers.

I’m on the lam.

I’d really like to delay joining the real world for a while — as long as possible, really.
So can anyone tell me if there is a version of a post-college gap year? Does that even exist?

Seriously, there’s a bounty in store for whomever emails me. Make my dreams come true.

I’m 22, and for essentially my whole life, I’ve been a student.

I’m about to graduate in a few weeks, and then all of a sudden that won’t be my identity anymore.

I’m not going to quote the obvious: “Good Riddance,”“Graduation (Friends Forever),” “I Will Remember You.”

I don’t feel that nostalgic.

I guess it hasn’t kicked in yet. Right now I’m just nervous to leave the collegiate world — the self-assuredness, the comfort, the cushion between legal adulthood and the so-called real world where you can still get away with wearing sweatpants most anywhere.

The big “What now?” is a familiar rite of passage for graduating collegians each semester.

This is not an exclusive privilege reserved for college seniors. In fact, at every phase of life we encounter “What now?”

I just finished Ann Patchett’s essay of the same name, and she confirmed that the process of change does not necessarily have to be a scary thing.

As we transition from one chapter of our lives to the next, fear of the unknown does not have to prevent us from the excitement that a new leg of the journey brings. We can enjoy the free fall.

I know this, I do. But I’m a senior graduating in December.

Every time this “next step” is brought up, my lower intestines — or gallbladder, or whatever internal organs are around there, I don’t know because I’m not pre-med — feel like they’re eating themselves.

My hands get shaky and I start trying to distract myself or change the subject or brush it off.

“Just wait for it,” every college graduate who returns to visit tells me.

“You’ll become a different person once you get out of here. Your alcohol tolerance will be shot. You’ll be in bed by 10. You’ll go out, like, once a week, tops. You’ll have a shitty job you’ll hate that probably will have nothing to do with what you’re majoring in...”

“But it’s fun, though.” others protest.

“You and your friends will be making money — actual money — so you can do things.

You’re still young, and everything’s new and exciting. I mean, aside from the shitty jobs and apartments, it’s actually really fun, promise!”

“What will you do now?” they inevitably ask.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. “But I still have time.”

I have to ask: is now when life will “begin?”

What parameters define this real world? Paying your own bills? Having a 9 to 5? Going to bed at a reasonable hour and eating a proper breakfast?

Framing things on your walls and maybe having a real, live plant in your home?

Possibly even something as excruciatingly domestic as an orchid?

Even then, what would be left?

A woman weighing in at slightly more than she did before? Marketable job skills? A lifestyle that has steadily corroded my liver? A diploma? A cap-and-gown set I might return but also might not?

Here I am, less than one semester away from getting initiated in the greatest fraternal organization of all, the adult world, and all I can do is worry about whether I’ve wasted my time.

Or if I’ve made the right choices. All I can do is sit around some afternoons and experience the heart palpitations that accompany startling realizations that something else must start brewing.

Real world, real job, real adult.  Time to get cracking.

­— chkent@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Chloe Kent on Twitter @the_real_ck.