I’m Lonely, I’m Unemployed but Who Cares? I have a Degree! *note sarcasm*

I graduated in December (another story for another time) and have been working part-time, volunteering, but most importantly (still contemplating if this is a good thing or not) I’ve been…thinking. The common thread here is the ‘Loneliness of Grad Life’ and how being a Graduate comes with a boatload of worries, stigmas and negative thoughts. So let’s unpack that, shall we?

Can someone please teach me how to play scrabble?

Mental Illness + Graduate + Loneliness =
No sense of achievement whatsoever

I think there’s a lot of stigma around the fact that it’s very ‘oh poor you, you struggled at Uni’ but really the sense of fear of knowing you may not finish a 3-4 year degree is very real – that you could get to the ‘end’ and have to explain that you technically failed…yourself first, way before you even started University.

I was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) in 2013 and didn’t care at all about what it meant. In my books, it was to do this therapy thing, be cured and move on. This ‘illness’ was nothing. Little did I know then that it probably did have a huge effect on my studies and that yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, there.is.no.cure. ‘Managing’ is the keyword. We learn how to ‘manage’ our lives, our mental health which I hate to say we should all be taught to do in schools because this whole us vs. ‘normal’ people is for the birds.

‘Normal’ and those who are connotated with that label…yeah… can’t say I’m really jealous of ‘you guys’ either. We’re all f****d but we shouldn’t devalue those who struggle more. Regardless of why, if someone’s struggling you don’t ask ‘oh but by how much’ compared to someone ‘normal’. They’re struggling. Point Blank.

Simples.

There is nothing I would like more than to go into detail of the struggles at Uni, what exactly we struggle with when approaching graduation, life afterwards etc. which I probably will discuss in future posts but in this particular post, I wanted to comment on the ‘feeling’ of loneliness itself. How it expels in everyday life to the point you wouldn’t even want to hang out with yourself either…