Numb

It hasn't really hit me yet in full, the fact that I'm graduating. I realized it a little bit earlier today, when I put my toga on for the first time and heard Baccalaureate Mass at school. But even then--even while surrounded by my co-graduates at the Ateneo High School covered courts, with everyone in near-full graduation attire--I still felt detached, as though I was watching someone else go through the motions of culminating their academic career.

Whether or not I wrap my brain around it in time, however, it is happening, and it's happening to me. After fifteen years of uniforms, textbooks, report cards, evil teachers and awesome ones, friends, relationships, enemies, cafeteria food, school-hours traffic, homework, classrooms, and the whole she-bang... it's over. Tomorrow, sometime between four-thirty in the afternoon and eight at night, I'm going to get up on that stage, shake Fr. Ben's hand, and descend the stairs once again, no longer a student.

Good God. I'm relieved, of course, knowing that the burden of the academe will, in mere hours, be lifted from my shoulders at last. 

But I'm also utterly shocked. I have no idea how to not be a student. I've always been a student, almost as far back as I can remember: I was a student-leader, a student-driver, a student-teacher, a student-DJ, a student-everything. There was always a school project in the works, a test coming up, homework to finish. I can't imagine a life where the years are not divided into semesters and summer breaks, where I do not, twice to four times a year, receive feedback on my performance in the form of report cards. It seems completely beyond me.

And so I arrive the end of my student-journey sort of in awe of the fact that I'm actually here. I suppose that's why sentimentality and sadness take a back seat for me in this--I'm still caught up in the idea that it's all done. No more going back. Never again. I still have no clue what those words mean, what implications they bring to me and my life. 

Maybe when I finally, actually walk (or march) up the stage tomorrow, or maybe when I finally, actually have my diploma in my hands, maybe then it will hit me. Or maybe it won't hit me til the first time I'm turned down for a job, or til I report for my first day of a new (second) job. Who knows? For now, though, all I can feel is an odd, limbo-ish feeling of happy-sad numbness.

Congratulations. :p