what to call myself now...

This semester is my last one as an undergrad, and ever since I heard that I had enough credits to graduate a year early, I've been a little unnerved. My aunts and uncles and my grandparents were all thrilled for me, constantly asking what I had planned for my future, proud that I had been so driven and was able to finish ahead of schedule...but the truth is I never intended to finish school early, and if I wasn't paying for my education with loans, I would have stayed in college for at least another year. Because my answer to my relatives' questions was always the same: I don't know.

A few of my relatives told me to appreciate that freedom. To take advantage of not having any ties and go and experience life...but I always thought, that's easy for them to say, they aren't the ones with all this "freedom." Up until the end of this semester, that lack of knowledge, that uncertainty about where I was going and what I was doing was entirely terrifying. I knew everything would work out, I wasn't genuinely "afraid" of anything, but something still made me uncomfortable when I thought about life post-grad. I didn't understand what it was until this semester that was throwing me for such a serious loop, but now I think I get it.

I knew that we lived in a Cartesian society, that we loved to categorize and classify everything around us, but it didn't strike me until this class that that includes ourselves. My fear for my future was that someone would ask me who I was and what I was doing and for the first time, I wouldn't have a definition of myself to give to other people. In high school, people would ask me about myself and I could say "I'm a student" or "I'm a choir-nerd" and in college I've been able to say "I'm an English major." In a few days, I will no longer be that. I'll be a college grad, true, but that will be my past. Telling people I'm a waitress isn't a category that I want to put myself in, yet I'm sure really sure what category I want to put myself in yet. I won't have a label that I can be happy to tell people about, that I want to define myself by.

I get when people say that what we've talked about in class has been a little unnerving, but it's sort of had the opposite effect on me. I went into this past semester totally ready to not have to go to class anymore, but really unsure of what that meant for who I was going to be when I was done. Now, while the idea of not having a nice, handy label for myself is still a little daunting, I think the things we've talked about in class have been sort of reassuring. The labels we come up with as a society are definitely not always right, and in a lot of ways can be more restricting than helpful, so maybe the same will be true for me. Maybe what my relatives say will be true, and the freedom will be, well, freeing!