Graduating and Reflecting

Finals are ahead, and it's all coming to an end so quickly. I don’t know if this will be my last blog, but here are some graduation reflections and many final book/author recommendations.

Reflecting:

Graduating feels like standing in a doorway caught between endings and beginnings, between who I was and who I am becoming. 

I wasn’t supposed to graduate this early. Spring was the plan. 

But life moved faster than I expected. Mostly, I was excited to graduate early, until I put on my cap and gown and felt the truth settle on my shoulders: this chapter is really closing. 

I’m excited for what comes next, to step into a future that finally feels safe, a future I’m genuinely hopeful for. But there is a soft ache, too.  

Still, gratitude sits beside me. I have learned so much about myself here. I feel more at home in my own skin than I ever have. After grief, after depression, after the kind of anxiety that steals your breath, I’m grateful to simply feel okay, to feel good, even. 

I’m ready for new experiences, for whatever life decides to hand me next. 

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that being myself, fully, is the only thing that ever really matters. But learning to love yourself is its own kind of bravery. It requires sitting with the parts of you you were taught to shrink, the parts you felt undeserving of.  

Somewhere along the way, I found my voice. And radio was a place that I could use it.

I think about the girl who first stepped onto campus, the one who had a panic attack at orientation, the one who walked into every room feeling too small, too unsure. Anxiety is a shadow that never fully disappears, but some days, the light outshines it. And I think on graduation day, as I walk across the stage, I will feel that light.

With that, here are some very last book recommendations from me and some beautiful words from my favorite authors that will always be able to explain my own feelings better than I ever could: 

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.” — W. Somerset Maugham

Perfect for formative times in our lives, I highly recommend: The Razor’s Edge

“Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.” — Ottessa Moshfegh

• Recommendation: Eileen

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, I exist as I am, that is enough.” — Walt Whitman 

• Recommendation: Leaves of Grass (especially Song of Myself) 

“I am free and that is why I am lost.” — Franz Kafka 

• Recommendation: The Metamorphosis or The Trial 

“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”— Leo Tolstoy

• Recommendation: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?” — Sylvia Plath, from her journals 

• Recommendation: The Bell Jar and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 

“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”— Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

Recommendation: Every Sally Rooney book, especially, Normal People

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” — Oscar Wilde 

• Recommendation: The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Importance of Being Earnest 

“Unless I am myself, I am nobody.” — Virginia Woolf 

• Recommendation: A Room of One’s Own or Mrs. Dalloway 

“You are your best thing.” — Toni Morrison, from Beloved 

• Recommendation: Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise 

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life" — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 

• Recommendation: The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night 

Mary Oliver: 

Recommendations:  

• “Wild Geese” — from Dream Work (1986) 

• “I Worried” — from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems 

And my all-time favorite book: 

“I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.” — Lewis Carroll 

• Recommendation: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland