Dear gentle readers,</p>
Chances are you’ve gone through or will go through a dramatic end to your final year of university. It may only be a last push through exams, something that you’re likely all too familiar with. Or you could have something similar to my experience: exams, creative writing portfolio, and an undergraduate thesis. In any event, this struggle to the end will feel different from the others because of one fact: you need to pass your classes in order to graduate this term. That knowledge can be a very scary. It gave me such an acute degree of pressure that the mere thought of failure set my feet racing towards the nearest source of carbohydrates.
But I eventually got everything done that I needed to, even if it took me until the final day of exams. I still remember it. I went home and felt the most blessed feeling of calm envelop me. I didn’t need to worry about school anymore. I now had the freedom to do whatever I wanted. The possibilities seemed limitless.
And then my sails went slack. Without the pressure that university had supplied, I didn’t feel motivated. I had gotten so used to that weight. I’d come to rely on it to fuel me. I knew vaguely where I wanted to go next, but my goals where so weak that they didn’t have the power necessary to make me move toward them.
So, what did I do? I played Skyrim, hours and hours of Skyrim… For about three weeks… Every day. I’m not proud of that. Although, I think that I used it as a copping mechanism or a substitute for school. I needed to have a motivator, and Skyrim became that for me. It gave me missions to complete in a world that I knew I had the power to conquer. I was the hero of my life story, or at least of my fanciful one. Not even the mightiest of creatures could stand in my way. Best of all, the game rewarded me with cool items and skill points. I could ignore the world that had become so unfamiliar to me by immersing myself in one that in some strange way was more like the one I’d known.
But you can only float listlessly for a little while before reality hits you: life’s moving on, and you’re missing out on chances to change your situation. You need a heading and a method to get there. I realized that I would need to put the wind in my own sails. I wasn’t going to get there just by hoping that something was going to come my way. So I pulled myself out of Skyrim and set my eyes on the clearest sight in the vista of possibilities: employment. Until next time, gentle readers.
