AUCKLAND, New Zealand — This week, a dear friend told me that I’m adulting well. That got me thinking about adulting — the bizarreness of both the word and the act. The word doesn’t feel at all accurate: since I graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi, I’ve felt not like I’ve been doing life, but rather like life has been doing me.

But — and this is a big but — I just got a job. Finally. After months of insecurity, endless frustration and the soul-sucking consistency of No's, and Sorry's, and We don't want you's and We kind of like you but not enough's, one company finally said yes. And by some bizarre twist of fate this happened on almost the same day that fall semester started, almost as if some higher being didn’t deem it acceptable for me to spend more than a full summer idle. There are a lot of things I wish I’d known before I left Abu Dhabi, a lot of feelings that would have been easier to accept had I known that others in my graduating class were fully immersed in them too. I think the fact that not so many NYUAD students have actually done this commencement thing means we haven’t really had a chance to talk about it, but I think we should and I think we need to.

A lot of the last three months have felt completely surreal, especially since I was asleep for my entire homeward journey from Dubai to Auckland so there’s no real way to prove to myself that it actually happened at all. In part, this summer has been very much like a post-NYUAD hangover — or more aptly, an extended jet lag, which, when you think about it, feels much the same. Transitioning out of NYUAD will be one of the biggest journeys I will ever undertake, and if jet lag arises from transitions, it makes sense that post-NYUAD jet lag lasts for months rather than for hours or days.

That last day is as vivid in my mind as those purple robes are in all my photos. I want to bring a little of the vividness and veracity of that image to you future graduates, because I wish someone had done so for me. I wish someone had told me that it was going to be so damn hard, and that few other moments in my life would ever make me feel as disoriented and as completely groundless as I did when I drove away from our oasis in the Saadiyat desert for the very last time. I can’t describe the heartbreak of indefinite rather than time-bounded goodbyes; you really just have to put that off for as long as possible, and ride out the tsunami when it crashes. I can’t describe the feeling of realising that campus is no longer home, and that my classmates are no longer functionally my family. I can’t describe how it felt to sit alone in the boarding lounge at six in the morning, waiting to get on a plane that was taking me away from the place that I was absolutely certain I belonged to.

In all honesty, graduation felt like a responsibility I wasn’t ready for. I was shocked that my overriding feeling that day was less one of sadness and more one of plain bewilderment that someone had made the call that I, Bachelor #78, was fit for the outside world. I kept wanting to approach someone — a trusted professor, a friend even — and tap on their shoulder and ask, Are you sure about this? I just needed to hear someone say that they were unwaveringly confident that I was ready for the real world. No matter how many times and from whom I heard it, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure that leaving was, or ever would be, the right thing for me to do.

It’s human nature to focus on the present. When I got accepted to NYUAD and began forging bonds with people and places, I was thinking about the happiness of the now, rather than of when, why and how it would all end. It’s pretty inescapable that our ending is more abrupt than most. I was completely packed and out of my room within 12 hours of graduating. Among the intensity of that single day, there were only the tiniest spaces in which to fit the big stuff; the soul-searing realisation of my one-way departure and the farewell to too many people that became a farewell to almost no one, because underdoing it was so much easier than attempting to do it justice.

So, what happens? What happens after the enormous emotional crash and the subsequent physical collapse? What happens after a few days of being in your post-NYUAD destination and realizing, sort of, that it’s actually real?

We talk a lot about the NYUAD bubble, but I started thinking about it as more of a blanket; an insulating layer that doesn’t entirely protect, but certainly takes the hardest knocks for you. Living without that blanket is immeasurably tough at first — and a lot colder — but it is also slowly, reluctantly, grudgingly rewarding. Sensations are more acute, since the outside world cares much less than the NYUAD world about those sensations’ effect on you. This means that for me, many of the bad times have been worse, but the good times have also been better because I feel I’ve worked harder for them. A 1,000 dollar paycheck has a completely different value than a 1,000 dollar stipend.

I also remain astonished at how little time there is in everyday life. In Abu Dhabi, I’m ashamed to admit, more or less everything I needed and everyone I cared about was a 10-minute walk away at most. That’s really why graduating is disorienting; suddenly my 10-minute world got onto 142 different flights to nearly as many countries. My 10-minute world expanded its radius from a couple of kilometres to pretty much the Earth’s circumference. It was like a bunch of migrating birds had all of a sudden peeled off at 142 different angles, each suddenly redefining their definition of home like some sort of possessed carrier pigeon with a case of mistaken identity.

And as many of you already know, it can be incredibly hard to redefine home. For some reason, for me, there’s always a time lag. It was the same when I first moved to NYUAD. The act of moving countries is an odd one, I think, that your brain takes far longer to adjust to than your body, a sort of cognitive jet lag that leaves a fog over you for months. And cognitive jet lag is just as awful as it sounds; physical jet lag leaves your body confused, but cognitive jet lag hits you straight in the amygdala, that is to say, right in the feels. Physical jet lag might shatter your body clock, but cognitive jet lag shatters something a little deeper, a little scarier and a little harder to fix.

Thankfully, cognitive jet lag is fixable. It takes longer, and is substantially harder, but it can be done. For me, it took seven weeks; for anyone else it might take five days or weeks or months. I also made a map of Auckland, my home city, and that helped considerably. I think the act of dropping pins at every restaurant I ate at or park I picnicked in was ostensibly a way of recording and remembering the good places I’d been, but also a reminder to myself in quite a physical way that I am here and I was there, that I do exist and move around in this place that feels so unfamiliar.

It also helped immeasurably that I came home straight into the embrace of my high school sweetheart, who has been more of an anchor than I ever could have asked for or imagined despite my best attempts to drift away from Auckland. Obviously, this isn’t a ubiquitous option, but it certainly helps to reconnect with those you love. If there’s one thing I learned in the peripatetic environment of NYUAD, it’s that where you are doesn’t matter as much as who you’re with. It is an enormous privilege, rather than a limitation, to have travelled enough to understand the truth of that statement; use it to your advantage, rather than feeling constrained by it.

Ultimately the cognitive jet lag does fade, seeping out of you a day at a time like physical jet lag seeps out of one finger, one toe, one leg, one arm at a time. As you adopt or re-adopt the accent of your chosen or accidental destination, as the international-school-speech of NYUAD falls away, you’ll start to feel like you fit somewhere that isn’t a grey zone, a liminal state, a waiting room. I never even thought I would end up back home; yet in a couple of months, I’ve gone from actively searching for ways to leave Auckland, to aggressively pursuing ways to stay. I settled down almost by accident, and because it was by accident, I almost overlooked just how settled I actually felt. The thought of leaving yet again, of creating another life for myself, of forging new relationships and mapping pathways in new cities and creating yet another slightly different version of myself, just feels exhausting.

I think wherever you go after NYUAD, you will feel a little bit of culture shock. The culture that we have created at NYUAD is so unique that, sort of by default, everything else feels weird and hard to get used to — a little off-balance, like another latitude-line tightrope you haven’t quite found your footing on.

And still, I’m not quite there; I have a pile of photos I haven’t yet stuck on my bedroom wall, because I can’t quite shake the now-instinctive feeling that I’m going to get on another plane very soon. I guess I also just can’t bear to completely unpack. But I think soon the day will come where I’ll find a space where I feel those photos and the memories that go with them belong, and I’ll be able to make them visible and physical, and I’ll finally believe that I am also visible and physical in this place I have chosen to re-make home.