Adjusting
If there's one thing I feel like we don't talk about enough, or we don't prepare people for enough, it is adjusting to life after school, most specifically the first few months after graduating.
I was talking to a friend of mine (who's also my neighbour) yesterday who graduated last year, I was asking him how he was feeling because he had this dull look on his face, and the words that came out of his mouth was that his mental health was going through a lot.
He explained to me how he was feeling and from what I could gather, he basically was bored of doing nothing and it was beginning to affect him. You see, my school is quite slow when it comes to processing the results of final year students, this is why it took me until now to get my result because they had taken more than a year to get it ready.
So usually, what happens during this period of waiting is you just sitting around, doing nothing. You go from a busy life of having to wake up every morning to rush to school, do assignments and attend classes, to a life of just sitting around all day waiting, while going to school every now and then to put some finishing touches on your final year project or to make one or two payments that are left for you to make.
That transition from a busy life, to a slow, almost uneventful one is a change that happens so fast, that it just disorganizes everything about you. Now, if you're someone who has always had an active life outside of school, it might not affect you much because you have other things that will immediately occupy that void which used to be filled with your school activities.
But if you're someone who doesn't have that much of a life outside school activities, you start to feel that void, not immediately but eventually, unless you look for something to fill it with. And the reason why I say not immediately is because at first, you will appreciate the free time, the time for you to rest and do whatever you want.
But unless you find something to keep yourself busy with, a time will come where all you do is rest, and suddenly that rest wouldn't feel as peaceful anymore because that is when you will start having conversations with yourself about how all you do is waste time, but then there's nothing you can do about it because unless your result is ready, all you can do is wait.
But is that true?
Well, just like I advised my friend yesterday, the best thing to do in times like this is to keep your mind busy by doing something productive, like getting a job. Luckily for us, this is a student environment and there are a lot of jobs here that doesn't require any qualifications that you could work for some few months and leave whenever you want to.
Having a job won't only help you fill that void, it will also provide you with cash, and that to me is killing two birds with one stone.