Three weeks since graduation, ten days since I moved back home. My serotonin levels have fucked off on a Ryanair flight to Mallorca, it would seem. Maybe one of the Greek islands. Meanwhile, I apply for jobs, browsing LinkedIn and typing cover letters with robotic frequency. My CV is saved to the desktop of my computer for easy access. It’s hard to sell yourself when your brain isn’t on side.
After the eight months of unrelenting academia and alcohol that constituted my final year of university, eight months of books and research and drinking cheap bottles of wine in other people’s hallways, it’s all come shuddering to a halt. After three years of living with an average of 6.3 people, it is just me and my mum and my dad in our house on this quiet suburban street. I don’t know what to do with myself. Everything has gone still and quiet all at once and my busy, noisy brain isn’t sure what to do with itself. Right now it doesn’t want to do anything, in this unbearable quiet. It wants to sleep and lie around and feel sorry for itself. It doesn’t want to eat or talk to people or do anything verging on productive, but it makes a token effort, despite itself. How generous.
So I apply for jobs and listen to Abba a lot, because no one can be depressed when they’re listening to Abba, right? Right?
I know things won’t be like this forever. I know I’ll have some kind of job sooner or later, and I know I’ll be reunited with my uni friends soon enough. I know it’s only been ten days. But August has always felt like a kind of purgatory to me, an in-between time, seemingly never-ending, when all there is to do is wait. The fact that I don’t have a new school year to begin in September doesn’t seem to have changed that. The heatwave probably doesn’t help either, this unrelenting closeness that fills every room in the house and makes the smallest of movements feel strenuous. Heatwaves are the ideal companion for depression, really. A match made in sticky, sweaty purgatory. But heatwaves have to break eventually, and my serotonin will have to get on a return flight from Palma. Hopefully.
EMILY GARBUTT 