This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
What Chapter Are You…
Leaving:
Four years of structured university life.
In:
The post-graduation "in-between."
Entering:
Early adulthood and professional independence in a new city.
For twenty-plus years, life had a built-in trajectory. Fifth grade led to sixth. Sophomore year led to junior year Finals led to summer. The school handled the timeline for you. You might have been overwhelmed, but at least everyone agreed on what week it was.
Then, you graduate and the timeline stops. Suddenly, there is no syllabus, registrar, or automated email from an advisor titled, “Important Next Steps.” (You begin to crave that correspondence with humiliating intensity.) The day belongs to you. This is presented as “freedom,” but often feels like being thrown into the water, not knowing how to swim.
Postgrad life is strange because nothing has technically gone wrong. You graduated! People are proud of you. There were photos and flowers and cards. And yet, immediately after, the ceremony curdles into logistics. Where are you living? What are you doing? Are you moving? Are you saving money?
You apply to entry-level jobs and tweak your résumé because you are unsure whether past responsibilities like “assisted with project management” sound too vague. You write cover letters in a tone of forced enthusiasm: “I am thrilled to apply” and “I have long admired your work.” It feels pathetic, this stream of polite petitions sent into hiring portals that may not even be monitored by real people.
The design flaw of postgrad life is that it begins with a ceremony which suggests completion. We dress up the end of college as a coronation, but the experience is closer to being pushed off a dock while everyone waves from the shore. A diploma has a cruel joke built into it: the document says you are finished, while every practical detail suggests you have barely begun.
The worst part is having to explain yourself when you don’t have the answers. At family dinners, in the grocery store, or on your mother’s Facebook page, someone always asks: “So, what’s next?”
Before you can think, your anxiety answers for you. Your shoulders tighten, you smile in a way that is highly overqualified and deeply underpaid, and you offer a cheerful response about looking for roles in New York, grad school, or “taking the summer to figure things out.” The question is affectionate, but it lands like a small civic interrogation.
What people want is a clean answer: a job title, a city, a start date, and a salary that does not require parental euphemism. A happy before-and-after story. Student to employee. Dorm room to apartment. Small errands become tests of competence. Returning an online order, refilling a prescription, depositing a check, calling the dentist back. Somehow, they become existential. You wonder: Can I be trusted to manage a life?
Sometimes the answer appears to be no. It is easy to have a minor breakdown over something ordinary, like choosing an email subject line that sounds professional without sounding embalmed. In postgrad life, the scale gets warped. One ghosted email feels like ruin, one decent networking call can feel like salvation. You start to feel everything more intensely when no one is watching.
After graduation, wanting becomes unsupervised. No one tells you which opportunities are worth your time, which ambitions are real, or which ones you inherited from prestige, panic, or Instagram.
You learn that some jobs look better on paper than they do in real life. You learn that prestige is a drug with a miserable comedown. You learn that a city can feel like destiny in the abstract and a utility bill in the concrete. You learn that comparison turns affection into acid.
Part of the problem is that postgrad life is unusually public. Everyone is announcing something: a job, a move, a fellowship, a lease, a new city. The language is almost always the same. People are “excited to share,” “thrilled to announce,” and “grateful for the opportunity.” Meanwhile, the actual process is much less photogenic. There are unanswered emails, awkward informational calls, half-written cover letters, and long afternoons spent wondering whether “just following up” sounds normal or desperate.
But the effort accumulates. The cover letters and conversations add up. The humiliations compound too, but so do the recoveries. You send the follow-up. You ask for advice. You survive the silence, fix the sentences, show up anyway, and try again.
My older daughter is a high school junior. This is such a clear-eyed description of what the next set of years can be. More questions than answers. It actually never really changed for me and I’m almost 50 💫