Yesterday, I graduated from college. Today was Mother's Day. Tomorrow, I start my new job as a full-time reporter at The Advance Newspapers in Jenison, Mich.The next day I'll fly to the moon.

Probably not, but I can't help but feel like everything is whizzing past me as I sit idle in a rocket ship. What will change next? I sit in my new apartment with my new (okay, old) furniture and contemplate this new thing called not moving.

How do I just sit with myself? How do I be alone? How do deal with an emaciated email inbox when I was used to receiving 50-60 emails a day as the top editor of our newspaper? How do I handle listening to the silence of an unringing cell phone? How do I cope with the quiet of an unknocked door? How do I live with a to-do list that includes buying a can opener and blogging?

All at once I am aware of myself. Who is this now college graduate with a “real job” and her own apartment?

I feel so out of the college, hyper-active, over-worked, insanity that we all complain about but in the complaints we develop a camaraderie of hatred toward a common “man.”

Who am I apart from “the man” of the school system who fills my life with displeasure? Who am I apart from the emails, the cell phone calls, and the knocks on the door?

Am I anyone?

Will I go into tomorrow’s job and immediately try to make friends with the secretary, my managing editor, and the other reporters so that they can tell me through their approval or disapproval that I have value?

Because I think that that might be part of it. For so long (for the last fifteen years, to be exact) I have struggled with defining myself by success in what I do, and suddenly, what I do is gone. I flip the tassel from right to left and I am suddenly without a purpose.

You can go insane without a purpose.

But, phew. I have a job I start tomorrow morning. Thank God that this uncomfortable silence and aloneness will be filled up with things to do and people to please.

Oh wait, I’m a grown up now. I have a choice in this. I don’t have to keep living like my busyness and other people give me purpose.

But the real question is: Will I choose it?