Trust the Process*
*And Shonda Rhimes. And Chipotle.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked in the last month, “How does it feel?” I would have enough money to not have to go through the whole post-college-job-hunting thing. Of course, said question has been asked about said post-college topic. Or, more specifically, about how it feels in general to graduate—to arrive at the milestone that every year of school before it has been pointing towards.
My answer has differed based on the day. On the hour. On the minute, sometimes.
Great! Weird. Exciting. Stressful. Too fast. Right on time. I don’t know. Overwhelming. Good! I’m not actually feeling anything.
All tried and true answers, tested in real life conversations by yours truly. I can confirm that they will work if you, too, are being asked how graduating feels. The truth is, despite being seasoned at answering this question by now, when it comes up, I still get squirmy. My mind goes blank. I don’t have a definitive answer that feels right.
Well, I’ve only ever been a student, and I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing how to be a student, so I’m having a mild identity crisis now.
I’m never again going to feel my stomach drop from having a 7 page paper due in the next 1-3 business days that I don’t have so much as a thesis for yet. Thank goodness.
I’ve spent the last few years at the Disney World of film school and now?? I have to leave??
I’ll get to be in the same time zone as so many of my friends and family again!
I’m going to be across the country from so many people I care about—again. Just different people this time.
All of these answers are too long, or too honest, or too existential, and they’re not what people are looking for when they turn to me with a great big grin, in the passing of a hello/goodbye hug, and say, “So! How does it feel?!”
It feels like all of these things. All at once.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I don’t like the question. I’m touched when people ask. I just wish that I had a more adequate answer for it. There is a version of this question, though, that I have been able to answer more easily.
My sister asked me, at the end of all the graduation festivities, what my favorite part of the weekend had been.
“After the big ceremony. Chipotle and Grey’s,” I said without hesitation.
The school-wide commencement ceremony was on a Thursday night, starting at 7:00 and ending well after 10:00. It was undeniably a spectacle: an award-winning film director as speaker, a lit up Olympic torch, a drone show, and a fireworks show all to usher in the weekend’s celebrations of academia. It was also, notably, outdoors. A common misconception about Southern California is that it is warm all the time; it is not. Especially at night, without any of the warm SoCal sunshine, it can feel just as cold as the East Coast. So, mix a late night with cold winds and thousands of people all trying to pour out of the parking lot at once and you get a very common family dynamic after a very uncommon night of pageantry. People are tired, people are cold, and people are hungry. Such was the case with my family as we waited for upwards of 20 minutes for an Uber while simultaneously trying to order pizza back to the hotel. The former inched its way through the traffic, making us regrettably think about how much faster it could have been to walk somewhere first; the latter canceled altogether.
“Well, if the food isn’t coming, are you sure you want to come back to the hotel with us?” My mom asked.
I shook my head. “No. I just want to go home.”
Which is how, at 10:55 PM, 5 minutes before they closed, I stood in line at the Chipotle next to my apartment building, decked out in full graduation regalia. I hadn’t eaten dinner, and being in the midst of also packing up my apartment to move, I had absolutely nothing in the fridge.
“We’re out of chicken, steak, veggies, and white rice,” the two working employees called out to the still-snaking line of people.
I stepped up to the counter. “Hi, I’m so sorry for being here so late.”
I know firsthand how frustrating it is to be working in food service and trying to close up, just a few minutes before the listed close time, with people still coming in to order. I wasn’t saying it out of platitude; I was sorry to be there.
“It’s okay,” they laughed.
They wouldn’t say it, but the grimaces underneath their painted-on smiles told me they were also sorry I was there.
In essence, I didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want me to be there. None of us really wanted to be there. But, there we were.
“Was graduation tonight?” One of them asked as we moved down the line of scant leftover ingredients.
“It was!”
“Oh, that’s why everyone is so dressed up. Congratulations.” He passed my burrito bowl to the other employee, now at the register.
I beamed. “Thanks.”
I think it was the first time all day I breathed. No, So what are you doing next? No, So how does it feel? No, So what does your life look like now? Just a basic human interaction like the ones I’d had dozens of times there on the nights I was too lazy to cook.
Balancing my graduation cap, stole, keys, and wallet, I tapped my card as she bagged up my order. With the beeeeeep of the credit card machine (the machine was also annoyed to be still working, clearly), I winced.
“I’m so sorry, can I possibly also get a Diet Coke?” I kept my card hovered in place, waiting for her to ring in the drink so I could tap again. She didn’t, though. With a swift slide, she nudged the bag my way before stepping away to help the other guy working.
“Oh, I—”
She cut me off. “You’re all set!”
I smiled to myself as I walked up to my apartment. Once inside, I kicked off my heels and rubbed the spots they left that were already starting to blister on my feet. I tossed the cap and gown onto the foot of my bed, tugged off the cords and stole, and wrapped myself in the coziest clothes I had that weren’t packed away in suitcases. The silence of the room hummed only briefly in my ears before I pressed “resume” on Grey’s Anatomy and had the sounds of dramatized medical jargon to keep me company while I ate.
My phone lit up a few minutes later. Sorry you ate alone, my sister’s text read.
I’m not, I typed back.
I wasn’t sorry. Not even a little bit. In all of the surrealness and commotion of graduation—in the layers of regalia that made me do a double take in the mirror because, oh, wait, I look like a graduate in this—this was the first moment that felt real. Probably because it was. The graduation itself was the result, the cherry on top of four years of studying. This? The last minute Chipotle and stolen moments of binge-watching between chaos was the cause. It was the norm. It was the reality of what went into getting to the point of graduating at all.
Maybe when celebrities talk about getting McDonalds or In n Out after award shows, this is why, I mused to myself. Sure, it could be because at the end of a long night of being in uncomfortable clothes the only thing that sounds good to eat is whatever’s fast and available, but maybe it’s also because there’s something so very dichotomic and grounding about capping off a milestone moment that feels so much bigger than us with something that is so painfully normal.
It’s the process vs. product phenomenon. When you study something creative, most of the time the education consists of learning the creative process over the end product. Trust the process, it’s a process, go back to the process, are all variations of the sentiment that I’m sure most every creative has heard from mentors.
Maybe part of why I couldn’t put into words how graduating felt was because graduation felt like the product. But this? The unassuming, late-night Chipotle and watching TV (preferably a Shonda Rhimes show) was quite literally the process. The pomp and circumstance is fun and I most certainly reveled in it, but there was something of a homecoming in the anticlimactic, so routinely typical way the actual graduation night ended.
Graduation was fun. And weird. And exciting. And surreal. And… and… and…. If you ask me how it feels to be done, I’ll probably be searching for the right words for the next 3-5 business da—months. Realistically, months.
But—if you ask me what my favorite part of the weekend was, I will answer you readily: Chipotle. And Grey’s Anatomy. A combination great for anything from ending a week of busy classes to topping off your biggest academic achievement to date.
As I recently said to a friend of mine: “Graduation was fun. I highly recommend graduating.”
But the quiet part, the part that I didn’t add? All signs during college are on the road to graduating. But graduating isn’t the best part. The rest of it is. You know, the process.
Don’t just trust the process. Relish in it. Whether it is school or creativity or anything in between, the process is the point.