I have landed in the desert

Intrigued? Well, unfortunately ythis is not an update from my travels around the world - in fact, what travels? - but an analogy that occured to me as I sit here on Saturday afternoon pondering my future.

So, the desert. What is it and why am I here? Well...

The desert is a barren place. Somewhere where, if you'd just been dropped by a plane there, you'd look around and see endless, endless sand. You'd just see the same things whichever way you looked and it would depress you because you wouldn't know what to do. You wouldn't know how to escape.

You might look straight ahead - sand. Behind you - sand. To the left - sand. Right - sand. No change. You would think that even if you chose a direction, trudged off that way for a few hours/days/weeks that when you stopped the landscape would still be the same and your journey would have been in vain. You would be no closer to finding out which way to go, how to escape, where food or shelter were etc.

That's how I feel.

School, in hindsight, was a high. College was an even bigger high. University was an amazing high. The problem with reaching the heights though, is that you have that much further to fall - flat on your bum, I might add - when you return to the real world. The disorienting, hopeless, stressful, pressured, constricting world of the graduate.

Let's look at each of those in turn and I'll explain why being a graduate is both all of those things and none of them - all at once.

Disorienting or not
You are bombarded by so many options, so much choice, so much of life, all of the pressures of debt and family and expectations, that you don't know which way to turn. You've lost the fellowship you had, the independance, the regular payments from the SLC, the structure to the week. You've gained mental anarchy.
Then again; its abundantly clear what your situation is an how to proceed: you can't live out of your overdraft forever, for the sake of your soul you can't live with your parents forever either. You must become financially independant with a job and a natty little flat.

Hopeless or not
You graduate with debt - a large and increasing debt - to the SLC, you have personal debt too, you have parents you really can't support you - all in a recession. There is no money for work based training and the JobCentre don't offer the free courses that you want to do. Most jobs require experience and relevant qualifications. You begin to feel that your degree really wasn't worth the effort.
Then again; you are in your early twenties, full of life, fresh-faced, eager, desperate to create your own life and you are highly qualified - your degree comes from a Russel Group Uni - you're not unemployable. You have ambition, life excites you, you want to live in a city, you don't mind the rat-race that the older generation despises.

Stressful or not
You are under pressure from the moment you start Uni if we're honest, to be career-focused, to look towards that graduate job - to make yourself employable. You're under pressure the moment you graduate to make that a reality. All this = strrrress! You stress yourself out too: "how am I going to afford bread/that dvd/that really nice coat/a college course/to pay off my overdraft/to move out of my parents house/to be independant?"! Your parents add stress by asking you the same questions "because they care"! A vicious circle emerges and consumes you - the end.
Or is it? On the other hand, there is no pressure... other than that you place on yourself! So what if you haven't walked in to a job that pays at least £30,000 a year and have started to pay in to a private pension fund by the age of 23! You will never have your twenties again. They're to be enjoyed, relished, cherished, because you were young and carefree, not because you aged yourself by 7 minutes every hour thinking about jobs/finances/next weeks shopping bill/how the Christmas lights will effect your electricity bill this quarter etc

Pressured or not
There are pressures in everyones life - from everywhere. Consumerism takes some of the blame. Our own identity takes it too though: take basic facts about me; female, 21, single. That tells me I can't sit on my laurels, or let myself get obese and ugly, because to look like a young woman nad not a navie, I need to look after myself. If I'm to have a husband and kids, the same applies with more besides - I need to get out - I won't meet him on my sofa or at work. That's without TV adverts, billboards, seeing other people etc. That is all before you consider the expectations placed upon you by yourself, your mates, your family, their friends, those you have taught you throughout your life the moment you become a graduate. Expectations are very hard to escape.
Or are they? What is to say that you can't break free of the constraints of society, hmmm? I am a natural cynic and so traditional graduate jobs - management etc - have never, ever appealed to me and I could think of little worse. What's to say I can't be very poor and very happy? Just look at Uni! What's to say I can't earn £20,000 and still be ok? Or £10,000 - ok maybe not £10,000, but you get the picture! All the world's a stage, waiting for my entrance!

Constricting or not
"When I left school there were 3 options for young women. Get married and have a family, work at Carston shirt factory or go to secretarial college. You have so much more going for you, don't let it go to waste!" The Maternal Figure, frequently. Of course I don't want to dissapoint the women who want to live through me and my generation, or to devalue all that women have struggled to achieve against - and in spite of - the glass ceiling. However, to quote Shakespeare again "this above all: to thine OWN self be true" and I must, or I'll never be happy. Is happiness overated? I think not. I've had to choose between what seemed the best option and what seemed the one that would make me happy before - I went for the happy factor and have never regretted it. So why does the world insist on everyone fitting in to a singular mould?
Then again, where else but in the 21stC has diversity been more richly celebrated? When else has the work place been more flexible? Will I ever be in a better place than I am now, with the future laid out before me? Am I in the desert or do I need to look closer, stride out further in each direction and, most of all, keep faith in who I am and what I want to achieve?

So there we have it. My mediations on the desert. I'll tell you one thing you learn from the desert: there is no getting back in to the plane. In life there is no going back to your Uni days - those are gone, as are the people you shared them with. You could never return to your college, your school. You aren't a child anymore, you have to move on. You have to remember that if life before your sudden arrival in the desert was ok, then the desert is not all there is to life and there can be life - and life to the full - after the desert.

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So everyone, that is my latest blog post. Isn't the human mind a wonderful thing? I feel like quite the literary master! Well, you know what they say: 'write what you know'. I have quite the priviledge in life to be able to look at my own situation, add some drama, irony and quirky little truths and make simple blogging into a cathartic purging of the soul.
I also love to be able to look back over my blogs and remind myself that life is a journey, during which you will always encounter the desert - maybe even spend long periods aimlessly wandering it - but you will always have an onward ticket, even if you don't know it.