How Long Is Yours?

This was graduation week at NYU, and if my calculations are correct that means I have been a graduate for an entire year. In some ways this week was more gratifying than my own graduation. Maybe that's because I was so busy at the end of last year that I didn't have much time to do anything in the way of celebrating. So I seized the opportunity this time around and spend the last four (or was it five?) nights very solidly drunk. I'd like to say I planned all this in a fantastic effort to reclaim some of my lost college drinking days, but the truth is I had no idea I was at a graduation party on Thursday until I was three drinks into the affair.

I didn't feel out of place there, maybe because I haven't really noticed the passage of time. In fact, the last several years of my life are a bit of a blur. I feel like I don't really belong; like I am lost in a foreign city, or even another planet. Something is out of place. I am a part of something huge, I know that much. But what it is, I am not sure, and where it is, is light years beyond my sight. I have these rushes of energy, these thoughts I can't quite grasp, and they seem alien to me, because I am not able to set them a place here on the cold, boring earth. Then again, this all might be because I am 23 and I am not supposed to have a clue what the fuck is going on.

But it still weighs on me for reasons I can't really understand. I find it a bit unhealthy to have such a generally unhappy aura, especially when the reason it is so is generally undefined. I was talking with a friend about this a few days ago, and I kept wondering out loud when things would settle down. Surely there has to be a point when these seas won't be so rough, and I can reclaim the bliss I lived in for so much time before now?

This conversation is one I seem to have pretty regularly, almost to the point where if I wasn't me, I would stop hanging out with myself. But anyway, we talked and nothing changed, because that's what happens when you talk about this, and he eventually asked me how long I had been feeling this way. I was hurt by the thought, but it didn't take me long to realize it's been most of the last three years. He only said a few words in return:

"That's pretty standard."