The Crisis of Graduate School

Allow me, if you will, to launch into a rant about the crisis that looms ahead for we who have just graduated from college: The crisis of graduate school.
College, at least for me and likely for many others, is from the very moment one first applies largely analogous to a curled up human being rolling and bouncing down the stairs. That is to say, we are pulled along throughout the entire process by a powerful and unseen force that is utterly impersonal and will not answer questions. This force is almost irresistible, making it difficult to move back up the stairs if that is one’s wish, and leaving sprawling-collapse as the only temporary or permanent way to stop forward progress.
Now, the thing about these stairs is that, being metaphorical in nature, they are not your ordinary household stairs. These stairs have many forks and many different angles and inclinations, and there is no handrail. Thus, as continue our painful, trundling descent, it is often the most that we can do to avoid falling off of the stairs entirely, into an abyss of educational abortion. And, thoroughly disoriented by the discomfort of whatever hard, uncarpeted step we happen to be rolling down at the moment, it becomes incredibly unlikely that we will take the opportunity to consider the long term implications of whatever fork we currently face. Whether choosing a school or a major or a concentration, we survey our choices and are rolled by the forces of gravity towards whichever one sounds best, not really understanding where that path leads or why. At this point, after all, most of us are just starting to wonder who we are and how we came to be rolling down stairs in the first place.
On some fine, hopefully sunny day that many have looked forward to for years, we reach the bottom. Unseen forces no longer compel us to bounce downward and instead act to press us against the cold, concrete floors of reality (as it has long been described to us). And so, here we are. After a short lifetime of being shepherded hastily through our education we are left standing (if we’re lucky) or prostrate (if we’re not) before six hundred different sets of upward-reaching stairs, each pointed in a different direction and ending at some unknown place off in the distance. Some of the steps are big and some of the steps are small, and some are green and some are angry and some have bear the screaming face of your second grade teacher telling you not to cry. But all of them are scary and most of them are lame and very few will make you rich or famous and even less will make you happy, if you’re not already, but you need to choose one because the floor is cold and you’re probably not wearing socks or shoes because you smoked too much pot this morning before you got dressed and thought it would be sunshine and grassy fields forever.
So now, after more than two decades of having your hand held and being told exactly what you want, you’re on your own! Good luck to you, child, follow your dreams. Well I don’t know what my dreams are, thank you very much, and I don’t know what I want to do with my life, or what life wants to do with me, or how that works at all. But I do know that for the moment I am utterly sick of stairs, thank you very much yes sir, and that is why I am taking a year off before grad school. And if you try to stop me I will fight you with fists full of bad poetry and half-conceived philosophical collapses because what I really learned in college is that I am whoever I am now and I’ll do whatever I need to do when and I’m playing by my own rules, Jack, so keep your hands off and watch me explode into another confused, pointless and unbelievably beautiful human catastrophe as the next act of the dance begins.