Hi friends, it’s been a little while!
In the past couple of months I’ve been spamming this blog with content about my final semester at college and my thoughts on graduating and that has all finally come to an end. I graduated from Georgetown University on May 18th wohoo! This is the end of my international student and just simply “student” identity which is something I kind of need to work through because at this point I’m not sure who I am without that part of me. Graduation was a whirlwind and after graduation I packed up my house, put all my belongings in storage, and went back home to London where I’ve been relaxing and doing a few Europe trips recently; it felt right to just soak up all the special moments that came along with graduation and not stress about writing on this blog during that time! I’ve been updating you on everything I’ve been doing since graduation and my brief hiatus on my instagram @little.miss.expat if you want to take a look!
I kind of put off writing this post for a while because it felt like it was a monumental one – packaging all of my four years of college into one blog post that’s reflective, funny, and worthy of the big moment that it describes. But I’ve spent my entire four years of college being intentionally reflective about each moment of my experience on this blog, so that takes off some of the pressure of this blog post.
In the lead up to graduation I went on a retreat with Georgetown where they took people from the senior class to a retreat center in rural Virginia and we spent two days playing games outside, hanging out with friends, and reflecting on college coming to an end and what’s next. Those conversations I had at retreat really got me thinking and helped me articulate lots of thoughts that I hadn’t been able to put into words before; I think that retreat was helpful in articulating these thoughts because we were specifically there to discuss and work through all of these exciting and nerve wracking thoughts and it was helpful to hear what other people were thinking about the same topics.
After retreat I wrote out a bunch of blog posts based on the things that I had been thinking about during retreat, but I didn’t get the chance to type them up and edit them into actual blog posts during graduation week. I thought for this blog post I’d share one of those reflections/posts that I wrote in the week leading up to my graduation; the tense will be a little off since this was written before my graduation but I still wanted to share it with you!
I think that I struggle with feeling proud of myself. When I walk across that stage at graduation, I think I’m going to be baffled about how to process this emotion of actually being proud of myself. As I’m writing this a week before graduation, I still can’t really comprehend what it feels like to be proud of myself and I keep thinking that this feeling will kick in sometime next week. While there are a lot of people who I must thank for getting me to this place and who I have already thanked, I also must recognize the work that I myself put in to get to this point. All of those moments where I’ve just wanted to breakdown and cry at college and where I really thought that I wouldn’t be able to do it, have let me to this moment of walking across the stage.
Each hard decision I’ve made such as taking the risk to move to the US for college, sticking with classes even when I thought they were challenging, deciding to stay in the US for summers to do different internships instead of going home, and navigating the sea of difficult situations that college has thrown at me, has moved me closer and closer to this point. Each struggle where I’ve questioned if I should be here, if I’m smart enough to be here, and if I can make it through this challenge has led me to this point and I didn’t even realize it at the time.
Someone recently brought up the idea that if we were given a brochure before coming to college of everything that we would experience while we were here, the good and the bad, we might not have thought we were capable of it all. Certainly for me, if someone had told me all the good and the bad that would happen to me while at Georgetown, I definitely would have chickened out and taken the easy route. If someone had told me about the insecurity, the heartbreak and loss, and the decisions I would experience if I were to come to Georgetown, I don’t think that I would have thought myself capable. If someone had told me about all the things I would achieve, the payoffs from the hard work, and the special moments I would experience, I also don’t know that I would have believed that they would happen to me.
Yet here I am, on the other side having been through it all. I still find it hard to process this emotion of feeling proud of myself and recognizing everything that I have done over the past four years as it just feels too recent to actually celebrate now. One thing that I can recognize right now though is how lucky I am to have been able to go through all of this – the good, the bad, and the ugly. I know that all of these experiences I’ve had over the past four years are going to set me up to do this all over again, this time, knowing how resilient and capable I really am.
See you next week,
