I’m about to graduate, and I’m terrified.

For the first time in my life, I’m not going to have ‘the next step’ waiting for me. After elementary school comes middle school, and then high school and then university and then… the rest of your life?

I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Once you graduate, you’re supposed to be an adult who can live on your own and pay bills and make good choices.

I just ate Doritos for dinner because I haven’t gone grocery shopping in a week.

You can see where my problem is.

Beyond that, there’s the daunting task of actually making enough money to pay said bills.

Just picking a major was hard enough, now I’m expected to pick what I want to do for the rest of my life, plus it has to actually pay well enough for me to live off of it?

Excuse me while I have a minor panic attack.

People keep asking me if I have a job lined up. I keep smiling and telling them, “Oh, I have a few options I’m considering.”

It’s not like I don’t have options either. I have been offered a job and I’m sure that if I tried (which I haven’t,) I could find a job in my field.

But neither of those options are the job I want. Hell, I don’t even know what the job I want is. I want to go out and do things, and see people and be young.

All I do know is that working 40 hours a week with a job I don’t love is definitely not what I want.

I’m scared and confused… but I’m not alone.

If you Google “college students scared to graduate,” there are literally millions of webpages talking about students scared of life after college. Most of those pages are articles or blogs written by students who are going through the same thing. Some of them are even people who have come out the other side and are doing great at this ‘being an adult’ thing.

I was talking to my dad on the phone the other day, and he kept telling me that being scared of graduating is natural, that everyone goes through it.

It’s hard to remember that sometimes – especially when everyone you know can’t wait to graduate and do great things with their lives.

It’s hard to remember that your friend with the awesome job lined up is terrified she’s going to mess it all up on her first day.

Or that your friend, who seems so calm and cool when he talks about living in L.A. to make independent films, is internally freaking out about the cost of living.

Finding your groove for the next stage of life is hard. Being a freshman in high school wasn’t easy, and neither will being a “real adult.”

But just because something is hard, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. Hopefully, 10 years from now, we can all look back on this period of our lives and laugh at the mistakes we’ll no doubt make, or the demeaning entry-level jobs we’ll have to work.

We’ll laugh, because we’ll have made it.