Once again, summer has come and gone much too quickly and I am still struggling to process that fact, except...this time it's a whole different feeling.
From elementary school to high school to post-secondary education, students of all ages are guaranteed a summer holiday (though the length of that may vary depending on factors such as part-time work and summer school). The point is, no matter how short summer vacation always seems to be, these students can count on next year to deliver another one. Alas, my time as a student has finally passed me by. Having graduated from university this June, this summer may very well be the last time that I have a guaranteed, official, no-strings-attached summer holiday. What comes next is anybody's guess.
It's been nearly two weeks since I came back from my two months vacation in Hong Kong, and yet I still feel like I haven't fully come back in some way. The jet lag is gone, but it seems like my heart is still jet lagged to Hong Kong-summer mode. It's not just the freedom and lack of responsibility that I miss (though it did feel pretty great), but it was also all my friends and family over there, the atmosphere, the lifestyle, everything. I stumbled upon this quote some time ago by the writer Azar Nafisi that I find to be quite true:
"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place. Like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again."
I guess you can say I'm still recovering from post-summer-stress-disorder, but really, it's more than that. In a sense, this summer had marked the end of my 'childhood', and I don't mean childhood in the conventional sense. By that, I mean it's the end of all my official education (for now at least), the end of having a reason or excuse to hide and protect me from the real world.
What I just said may sound a little familiar, since I did make a similar post about graduating a while back, but it's different in that right now I'm not actually too worried about the future. Instead, I'm feeling a massive wave of nostalgia for my entire life up to this point. Up until now my life has always been more or less structured, with a regular, daily routine to things. Sure, I've had difficulties along the way, but there'd always been a clear, specific goal in overcoming them. Given that most of the problems in my young life has been academic, it was always clear to me what I needed to do in order to solve them. No matter how bad things were back then, there was always an objective, some sort of solution to work towards; an end goal. But the real world doesn't work like that. You're thrown out there after all your learning and somehow, through all the noise and confusion, you have to find your place in it. I knew from the start that it was never going to be easy, but what I didn't know was how woefully ill-equipped I would when the time came. It's a little too late for regrets now, but damn...I sure miss the good old days. I guess that's all the more reason to get my life together, so that I'll have even more good old days to look back on.
Well, I think that's all for tonight. Sorry if my post got a little depressing, but I do feel better for writing it. And to any of my fellow readers/writers out there struggling through life for whatever reason, or maybe just having a bad day, I wish you all good luck, and goodnight.
