Graduated—Now What? A Wakefield Therapist Talks Next Steps (and Stress)
The Big Question After Graduation: What’s Next?
When graduating feels more like falling off a cliff, reach out to a therapist in Wakefield for help getting this back to an exciting transition!
After all the celebratory parties and dinners, farewells with roommates and selling-back of textbooks, comes “what’s next.” For some, this is a really exciting time because “what’s next” is planned travel or time with family before easing into an exciting job they landed months ago and living with friends. Yet for many people, “what’s next” feels incredibly daunting. This is true even if there are clear plans of where to live and work, and certainly true if there is a ton of uncertainty.
Graduating is a significant milestone in many people’s lives and the associated uncertainty can be emotionally paralyzing at times. What will happen with friendships? Why doesn’t it feel as exciting as it seemed like it would? There are so many questions and most of them don’t really have answers beyond “wait and see.”
If you find yourself worrying about how you will feel after graduation, if you already feel like you are flailing emotionally or if you know someone in this transition, read on to learn more about how to support yourself and how meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can also support someone in this big life transition.
The Emotional Rollercoaster Post-Graduation
There are usually some really high points after graduation, like realizing you never have sit through an unfavored teacher’s lecture again…you finally get a break in routines and you simply are DONE! These can be really exciting milestones to celebrate! Hopefully you also feel really proud of what you accomplished, whether you had to work really hard at it or even it school came easily. You made it to the finish line and have concrete recognition of your hard work.
Yet there can be some really low points too. Maybe you realize that you never got to experience certain things, like attending certain dances or having certain relationships that you thought would be part of your school experience. Perhaps you had a falling-out with a friend group close to graduation and feel really sad not to be celebrating with the people you thought you would to mark the occasion. Maybe your plans of living with roommates just were dashed when you realized you simply can’t afford to do so and so you will be living at home, which was not what you envisioned.
It is really common to have waves of differing emotions around graduation and often, riding out their intensity is the best approach, while getting any support you can from loved ones and trusted resources. How do you know when it’s too much though? If you find yourself pulling back from activities you would normally enjoy or struggling to get out of bed for more than a couple days at a time, you may benefit from more help. If you feel like you just can’t get yourself to look at things with a more enjoyable viewpoint, that also may be a sign it's time for more help. Generally, feeling stuck and unlike your best self, for more than a few days, is when you might want to think about therapy for this transition. You deserve to have it feel better.
Navigating Career Uncertainty
It can be extremely tricky to navigate the start of your career after graduation, whether or not you have a job that interests you lined up and ready to start. You may find yourself feeling like you are starting an interminable grind of work, work, work for decades ahead of you which feels endless and incredibly boring. You may feel like you are behind because you don’t have a great vision of where you want to be in five or ten years. This is okay. Is it hard? Absolutely, yet it can be hard and okay at the same time.
People will tell you that it’s okay to work and learn from each job, that you will learn about what you like and don’t like through jobs and can figure it out as you go, yet this often doesn’t really provide comfort. You want comfort and security now! The tough truth is that certainty is not right around the corner. I encourage you to adjust your thinking on this, and consider if certainty is really all it’s cracked up to be? Sure, it provides some predictability, but it can also border on feeling stagnant. It can be comforting, yet also not really encourage growth. Even people who are disinclined to spontaneity and chaos will acknowledge that a little spark of surprise does a good job at keeping life interesting and compelling.
Consider what you might be craving instead of absolute certainty? Can you break down certainty into smaller pieces that matter more to you? Perhaps you want reliable income at least for one year. Perhaps you want to know that you are learning something you can take to a future job. Narrowing your certainty quest can be really helpful to making peace with the pervasive unpredictability.
If you find this hard to do, a therapist in Wakefield can really help you through the process. When I work with people who are in the graduation transition or other life transitions, we will usually do a deep exploration of their values. Not the things you can download on the internet like do you value family, money or humor, but we will go deeper to explore these in a highly personalized way, and understand how your values work together to create your expectations on yourself. Then, we work to determine where the pain points are and how to get focused on the values that are the biggest priority to you.
For example, some people I work with might decide to grind it out at a job they don’t love because it’s an excellent resume booster and good money, and they want to reach a certain financial goal within a couple years. We will then work on how to develop an adaptive mindset to handle the grind of work in that time period, and how to enhance their life outside of work. For someone else though, we might work on how to find a job that really is compelling and enjoyable since so much time is spent at work. We will work on insecurities around looking for a job and giving notice when they haven’t been at a job for long, how to assess potential new job opportunities and how to feel secure in their decision to bring yet another transition and uncertainty into their life. Again, the work is highly personal and working with a therapist familiar with supporting individuals like you through life transitions can make the process much easier!
Developing Healthy Routines and Self-Care
Another challenge that comes with graduating is massive changes in routines! I remember feeling downright bewildered when weekends were completely free…no studying, no problem sets, no articles to read, no project hanging over me…simply free! Now that I am a business owner, I admit that has changed, but for a number of years, this was a huge change and honestly clumsy at first! I had to update narratives in my head of what I “should” be doing with my time. I had to adjust to not starting something new in September. I certainly had to adjust to no built-in vacation periods!
There are many adjustments both daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally and annually that happen after graduation. Staying attentive to these and intentional about navigating them is key to feeling well. Spoiler alert: you still need to get adequate sleep. You will still feel better if you move your body in ways that feel good to you. And eating well will still make you feel best. When time becomes your oyster though, it can take a while to figure out what rhythms work for you.
If you feel like your new routines sound good but you still feel off, there may be something deeper to explore. Are you neglecting social time? Alone time? Are you leaving time for intellectual pursuits and time for down time? If you feel off, therapy might be helpful to get an outside look at what you might try to adjust to feel better.
Overcoming Fear of “Doing It Wrong”
Sometimes, the hardest part of figuring out “what’s next” is worrying that you aren’t going to get it “right.” This perfectionism can make it really hard to make decisions, to move forward, and to enjoy anything about this transition.
If you find yourself getting tense about trying to avoid doing the “wrong” thing after graduation or wanting to ensure you get it “right,” I promise this can get better! We are all prone to get kind of rigid in this way when we feel insecure or when we feel like everyone else around us knows how to do something we don’t know how to do. Yet it is so important to remember that there is a lot of space in between right and wrong, and I would even argue that “right” and “wrong” are extremely subjective anyhow, so don’t really have all that much inherent meaning.
As a therapist in Wakefield, I encourage people to identify more specifically what worry is telling them might be associated with doing something “wrong,” and what promises perfectionism is telling them they will receive if they get it “right.” Depending on the individual, we can explore a combination of how to feel prepared to have a less-than-ideal outcome and to make the best of it, while also identifying how to maximize the chance of fulfillment in a next step.
For example, I worked with a young woman who was close to graduating from her Master’s program while she had an opportunity to live abroad for a year. She knew that if she went abroad, she would slow down her professional trajectory by taking a leave of absence. Yet she also knew that it was really important for her to take advantage of travel opportunities before having a family or career of her own, as these features, while desired, would make such travel more complicated in the future. When she raised this in therapy with me, she was up at night ruminating about what to do and entirely preoccupied during the day with talking herself in and out of both options. Together, we worked on identifying her priorities, the alternatives, and what other resources she could use to get information about the impacts of either path. We explored her values and how competing values ranked to her. Importantly, we also explored what she anticipated her capacity to be if faced with big challenges from either decision. If she returned to the United States and felt behind for years professionally, could she anticipate feeling secure about why she did that? If she stayed in the United States could she feel secure if she never got a travel opportunity like this again and missed this chance? Through a variety of explorations, she was able to make a decision that felt deeply genuine to her and with a degree of security that honestly surprised me because of how much anxiety she initially carried. I won’t spoil her decision, but I encourage you to think about how you might navigate something like this and what would help you with such a big transition decision.
How a Therapist in Wakefield Can Guide You Through This Transition
Therapy can help you get highly personalized support to address the unique challenges you are facing around the big transition of graduation. Therapy can help you learn about yourself in new ways that ultimately allow for more ease and security in your decisions. Importantly, it can help you stay in touch with the fun and exciting parts of the transition and feel like you can enjoy this phase much, much more.
Graduated and feeling stuck or stressed?
A therapist in Wakefield can help you navigate this exciting, challenging time with confidence. Whether you are navigating graduation or another life transition, feeling overwhelmed, or looking to reconnect with your passions, therapy can help you rediscover your path.
Reach out today to schedule a free consultation and take the first step toward a more fulfilling life!