Because putting them on Facebook seems a little…. Bleh.
As I write this I am sitting on the couch, looking out the living room glass doors to the ocean churning with an unusual fury as the surf comes in. It goes without saying that this is a good and appropriate metaphor for how I feel inside.
Okay. I’ll cut the crap (and crappy metaphors; I mean, really; that’s been said about a billion times over; though what’s said below has been said many times over, too).
Nothing.
I didn’t realize that I would feel so hollow when I graduated. The sense of accomplishment faded about 28 hours after I turned in my last paper. I’m trying to be all clinical and stoic but inside my throat and heart are melting into a viscous mass of goo that just can’t find a shape to adhere to.
I didn’t realize how big a sphere school created in my life, and how my gravity would be radically adjusted with the loss of that orbit around school. I feel so pitiful and pathetic, but I did (do) really love school, so much that this is looking a heckuva lot like a love letter rather than a farewell to academic pursuits for a while.
But honestly, this shouldn’t surprise me much. I knew I loved school before this– loved it probably a little too much. Hence why I am adamant about taking a year off from school, despite the fact that every time an e-mail comes in talking about a graduate program I want to run off and apply for it (I still need to take the GRE and all that jazz, I suppose).
I know that when I read this in a few months, I’ll think “wow, I was really…. WOW.” and laugh, but I don’t want myself to do that. I want myself to remember how much it mattered to me, because I don’t really want to get in this position again. Academic pursuits are alright, and school is awesome, but I shouldn’t feel like I constantly have to be excelling in that field to have self worth or find worth in life. Life is about relationships– God, people, myself, and then with learning science-y stuff.
Recently I was thinking (big surprise there), and I think I realized that some things… you just have to live. You can’t have these concise answers ready to pull out of your back pocket; you have to go through things, live things in order to know the answers… And even then, you may not know that answers, you just may feel more comfortable with the questions.
How to be Human 
This is a beautiful summation of post-graduation feelings. You are so spot on. And your last paragraph. I just love it. You just have to experience things. Like in Good Will Hunting–you can read about it forever, but you don’t know anything about it until you live it. (We watched it Sunday–funny timing, hu?)