One year ago today, I graduated from Boston College. Condoleezza Rice was our speaker, which not only caused a lot of protest but led to increased security, so it took literally hours to get everyone into the stadium. I’d been up all night at Senior Sunrise on the parking garage roof, so I kept nodding off during the ceremony. Later, I kept falling asleep and waking up crying.

It didn’t feel like a celebration. It just felt an end. Granted, at the time I didn’t have a job, but I didn’t see graduation as a time to go out into the world and discover new possibilities. I could only see it as everything I’d loved about my life for the last four years disappearing. I was losing my friends who were moving away. I was losing a lot of free time. I was losing Chorale and Liturgy Arts Group and The Heights, and parties and campus events and dining hall food (which I did actually like). And believe it or not, I was mourning the loss of classes. I really loved most of the classes I took at BC, and I was going to miss them as much as anything.

Now, after being out of school for a year and working full-time for most of that year…honestly? My opinion hasn’t changed much. My sister is still at BC. Right now I live within feet of BC with Christina, who was my college roommate for two years. We live here mostly out of convenience, but it’s also been nice because it can kind of lull me into believing that I’m still in college.

I do love my job, and I’ve met some great people and made some wonderful friends there. But one reason I enjoy my lunch breaks at work so much is that it’s an hour a day I can spend with my fellow broke twenty-somethings—an hour a day I can stop pretending to be a grown-up. I still have an easier time relating to college students than to those in the working world. I can’t relate to anyone over the age of about 30 at all. Or at least to anyone who has his or her life together—has good money, owns a house, happily married, etc. I just feel like I have nothing to talk about with those people.

College ending kind of threw some relationships off-kilter. With friends who’ve moved out of town, our friendships are kind of permanently frozen in whatever state they were in a year ago. In other cases, I’ve been able to re-connect with friends who did stay in the area. College cliques sometimes dictate who you hang out with, so with that factor removed, I’ve been able to rekindle some old friendships. So that’s one good thing, I guess. But college is something I’ll never get back, and I don’t want to keep wondering if I made the most of it, or if there are opportunities I should have taken advantage of or things I should have done differently.

I really don’t feel like I’ve changed much in a year. I can only imagine what that makes some people reading this think about me. Maybe it validates your opinion of me as pathetic or immature, but it’s still the way I feel. I just hope I’m not writing the same entry this time next year.