escort diary® of Jolie: The end of my university journey (... I think)
I handed in my last assignment a month ago and I have not known what to do with myself since.
This is not a figure of speech, I mean it literally. I woke up the morning after and lay in bed for twenty minutes staring at the ceiling, not because I was savouring the moment but because my brain, the same brain that has reliably produced a to-do list before my eyes were fully open for the past ten years, was silent.
Not calm.
Not peaceful.
Silent.
In the way that a machine that has been running continuously for a decade is silent when someone finally pulls the plug: the absence of noise is itself a kind of noise: you hear the not-humming, you feel the not-vibrating, the room is the same room but it is emptier than it should be, and you can't figure out what's missing until you realise the missing thing is the weight.
I have been at university for twelve years, on and off.
A law degree.
A business degree.
An advanced MBA.
A handful of psychology certificates that I collected the way some people collect stamps: compulsively, with no clear end point, because the subject kept pulling at me and I have never been good at resisting a pull. I did most of this in a country that is not mine, in a language that is not my first, on a visa that told me exactly how many hours I was allowed to work while I figured out how to pay for the rest of it myself.
So I did, paid for it myself: around a hundred thousand dollars, earned in this profession, put directly into an education that most people fund with family money or government loans or the comfortable assumption that someone, somewhere, will catch them if they fall.
Nobody was going to catch me, I knew this early and I made my peace with it the way you make your peace with weather: not by liking it, but by dressing for it.
I do not have a safety net, but I have a very high tolerance for discomfort and an ego that refuses to let me quit things I've started, which is not the same as courage but it produces similar results.
And now it's done.
And now I don't know what to do.
For twelve years I have known what to do next. Not happily, not easily, but structurally, there was always the next assignment, the next unit, the next enrolment, the next deadline bearing down with the reliable urgency of something that would fail me if I didn't show up. And I showed up. Every single time. Not because I loved it, I loved parts of it, I endured the rest, but because the structure was the thing holding the shape of my life in place. Without it, I would have had to face the much harder question of what shape my life actually wants to be, and I was not ready for that question, and the degree program had the decency to never ask it.
Now it's asking.
Here is what nobody tells you about finishing something enormous: the moment of completion is not a climax. It is a cliff. You have been climbing for so long that the muscles required for climbing have become your identity, you are the person who is getting a degree, the person who is working toward something, the person who has a reason to be tired that sounds impressive at dinner parties. And then you reach the top and the climbing stops and you stand there, and the view is genuinely beautiful, and you feel... a little lost and empty.
What follows, at least for me, is something closer to a quiet, formless grief. Not for the degree... I am glad it's done, I do not miss the assignments, I never want to write another literature review, another research paper, another advocacy or another project management plan as long as I draw breath.
The grief is for the structure.
I lived in a corridor for ten years. It was narrow and it was exhausting and some days I hated it, but it only went in one direction, and there was a door at the end, and I have walked through the door, and now I am here, and here is everywhere, and everywhere is a lot.
Rilke wrote: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
The last four words are why I adore the poet: no feeling is final. Not the exhaustion, not the grief, not the vertigo, not the strange, disorienting blankness of a morning without a deadline. These are weather, they will pass, something else will come, and it will be different, and it will also pass, and the passing is not a loss but a proof that I am still moving.
I did all of this while being exactly who I am. Not in spite of this work, alongside it.
The two lives funded each other and informed each other and made each other possible: the psychology made me better at understanding people, the law made me better at protecting myself, the business degrees made me better at running this. And this, the work, the evenings, the conversations, made me better at all of it, because nothing teaches you about human beings faster than being paid to be genuine with them.
Twelve years, three disciplines, around a hundred thousand dollars, one person, no safety net.
I did it. It's done.
Tomorrow, or the day after, the first step comes. For now I'm on the sofa, doing the bare minimum to get my motivation back and preparing for my birthday solo diner, and it feels both beautiful and terrifying.
