When my roommates and I returned to Ann Arbor in August of 2009, we made one thing incredibly clear from the start: the words “senior” and “year” would not be mentioned in the same sentence. Ever. We insisted on referring to the upcoming semesters as “the year after junior year,” conciseness be damned.

Our rather transparent avoidance tactic worked well — perhaps too well — and I found myself living my year-after-junior-year just like I had the previous three: no looming deadlines, no uncertainty about the future, no thoughts of what I would do out in the “real world.”

Grown up, post-grad life was not something I wanted to think about, especially while in the midst of my pre-grad life. I was having too much fun as a student to worry about what came next.

Then sometime in mid-March, I realized that everyone around me had a plan. Despite our tequila-induced Welcome Week pact to avoid thoughts of life after college, my friends had cheated and were making moves. Grad school applications went out, GREs were taken, interviews conducted, apartments in faraway cities scouted, savings counted.

Unfortunately, no one was offering me a job like they were the B-school kids, I would have rather walked barefoot through a winter in Ann Arbor than gone to law school like the rest of the English majors and the D.C. humidity the Political Science students would be dealing with didn’t really work for my hair.

After several blissful — albeit ignorant — months of unbothered living, I quite abruptly found myself fighting to breathe under the flood of terrible, future-less thoughts pouring in.

For a long time, I’d been concocting a lovely image of what I wanted my life to be like after I “made it” and was wildly successful, respected and adored. Now, I was faced with defining how I was going to get there and the picture was quickly changing from a charmed life in great shoes to a murky grey existence wearing Crocs in the suburbs of New Jersey under my parents’ roof.

For my entire life I had known what was coming next: kindergarten to elementary to middle to high school to college. Simply put, there was always a plan. After 21 years of hyper-scheduled living, I was being tasked with creating my own “next” and it scared the shit out of me.

Sure, I was a fairly smart kid with good grades from a great school, I had a solid background in Hellenistic archaeology, 20th century American literature and the French Impressionist movement, but what exactly was I supposed to do with that?

Prior to my “senior year?!” — yeah, I said it — realization, I really felt I had embraced what college was supposed to be about by opting for interesting classes rather than practical ones. Crossword puzzles and “Jeopardy” clues came easily as a result of my liberal arts education, but not everyone can make a living as a game show contestant and I mentally kicked myself for taking History of Witchcraft over Econ 101 as I wiped my self-pity tears with the scratchy toilet paper in an Angell Hall bathroom.

An intense blanket of regret — a lead Snuggie, if you will — weighed on my shoulders as I thought about the things I should have done to improve my chances of not only finding a job, but finding a path. I knew what I liked to do to, but I was at a loss when it came to making these things tangible. Sadly, employment search engines don’t offer “hanging out” and “not thinking about the future” as options on their drop-down menus.

On top of this internal tear-filled blue period, I was also terribly aware of the dark period the economy was going through. To quote a May 2010 editorial on unemployment in The New York Times, “For the class of 2010, these are grim times.” Grim times indeed, and on so many levels.

I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, except Alice was a college graduate, the rabbit hole was our tanking economy, Wonderland was a cashier’s job at Starbucks — if I was lucky — and I’d never wake up from the dream because it would turn out to be my actual life.

Such were the morbid visions that plagued my last months as a college student: not only was I wearing Crocs in New Jersey, but now they were accessorized with a green apron as my diploma sat, useless, in a corner of my childhood bedroom while my mom drove me to and from work.

I had gone out of my way to avoid thinking about post-graduation life so long that all of my fears and uncertainties about the big, bad future were manifesting themselves in a giant, stale-coffee-scented nightmare.

Graduation was bittersweet, as was the summer that followed. I was still unemployed, but I had found a way to justify my dependency status by enrolling in a pseudo-graduate program in the industry I found most intriguing. Currently, I am employed in said intriguing industry in a job I’m learning to enjoy.

Is this a position I can see turning into a lifelong career? Maybe. Do I still harbor secret dreams of becoming a psychic detective? Absolutely.