Post the Fifty-Fourth - looking back, looking forward

The post I promised yesterday before I got all existential.

This week, friends and fellow students in the year below at Warwick (as well as my contemporaries who took an extra year) receive the final results of their undergraduate degrees - which means that a whole year has elapsed since I got mine on 25th June 2013. With this in mind, this post has three purposes: to congratulate everyone on their achievements, to gaze back on that day which at once seems so close and so far away, and to evaluate the metaphorical distance I have travelled since then.

Here goes.

To all graduands of the Class of 2014, well done! You've made it - and now's the time to revel in your hard-earned success. Enjoy the elation!

I remember being filled with a mixture of joy and disbelief. Where had those three years gone? But there was also an acknowledgement that it had been a long, hard slog and that all the work had paid off. Yet more paradoxes, I guess, continuing on from yesterday's theme - but I think that's the nature of time, because I have those dual emotions now. I can't quite fathom that it's been a year; yet so much has happened since then that I can't imagine it being any less.

I suppose these contradictions arise from the fact that I'm doing very similar things. I've been going to lectures and seminars, writing essays and now my dissertation. Yet although  they may be similar, they're not the same - because it's the second time around. In between these moments of parity there was a huge transition. I graduated, and I walked to do it, and whilst that marked an end it also marked a beginning.

A beginning of a life in which I have more confidence in myself, in both my physical and academic abilities, because I have proof of what is possible - but also because I no longer feel I need proof. I have no-one to convince but myself, and I think I'm finally coming to realise the truth of that statement, a year on.

So it's been time well spent, and I've lived every day to the full. It's just gone rather more quickly than expected...and that's okay. I can look back and smile and I can grin just as widely looking forward.

Hopefully I'll feel the same this time in 2015, with yet another degree under my belt, and hopefully my friends will too - whatever paths they take after their own results this week.