Eleven Days Left

There are eleven days left until graduation, and I can’t tell if time is moving too fast or if I’m just too tired to keep up. 

This semester has been one long, uninterrupted inhale. Traveling. Rushing. Running. Thinking. Doing. Every “-ing” except for pause-ing.

My life feels slightly upended, like someone picked up a snow globe and shook it a little too hard. And the glitter (or snow but I like glitter and I’ve never seen snow) hasn’t settled yet. It’s pretty, but disorienting.

(Also mildly concerning because I’m the glitter… or snow… whatever.)

I thought at some point things would slow down long enough for me to understand how I’m supposed to feel, but instead everything keeps freakin’ shifting. One moment I’m buzzing, the next I’m blank, and then I’m somewhere in between this half-present, half-floating, waiting for the ground to decide what it wants to do with me type of mood. I mean everything looks just fine on paper, but somehow all the edges of everything are smudged.

I haven’t posted in months. I kept telling myself I would, and then I didn’t. There was always one more thing: summer turning into a blur, trips that piled up, the website revamp that I convinced myself absolutely had to come first, the travel, the assignments, the late nights, the early mornings. And then the feeling that if I sat down to write, the words might spill out faster than I could keep up with them, or worse, not come out at all. It’s strange how avoiding your own thoughts becomes a habit before you even notice.

Stillness hasn’t been part of my vocabulary for a long time. And every now and then I catch myself craving it like a small pocket of quiet. But I haven’t had stillness in so long that I’m pretty sure I’d need instructions to recognize it.

I’m not “coasting” into this new chapter. If anything, it feels like I’m stumbling into it sideways. Some days feel manageable. Others feel like I’m waking up late for a life I’m already living. I get through the motions, I talk to people, I show up where I’m supposed to be, but there’s this constant hum under everything, a background noise that never shuts up.

Sometimes I drive somewhere, turn the car off and just sit there because my brain keeps running even when I don’t want it to. It been a constant case of “I’m fine” until I’m suddenly not, and then I’m staring at the wall like it knows something I don’t. As though the wall is going to turn into that talking tree from Pocahontas and spout out some words of wisdom and solves all the mysteries of my life. And then there are the moments where everything feels almost normal, almost stable, almost clear, like the glitter is finally settling, only for someone to shake the globe again.

This is not glamorous, it is not profound, and it is not the curated “new era loading” moment I thought I’d have at this point in my life.

Eleven days out from graduation and nothing feels small. Every single thought, feeling, and moment of silence feels like I’m making my way through a forest. Trying desperately to find my way out and I keep running into the same tree over and over.

I guess there’s no clean ending to this piece because I’m not in a clean chapter. That’s just where things are. And I think this is the part no one talks about. That stretch of days, weeks, or even months where life is rolling by faster than you can process it and trying like your life depends on it to just keep up.

So, here I am. Eleven days out. Letting the glitter fall wherever it wants to for once.