The experiences of leaving our universities after a period of 4 years or even 6 with prolonged ASUU strikes is quite a joyful one. Friends mostly demonstrate their love for this moment by creating activities. A university graduate will have to be bathed with dirty water and other things such as drinks to express the EUPHORIA this graduation comes with. As we graduate, we are left with the next stage which more often we don’t get to realize because our final days in our various colleges are often taken away by our need for ego gratification. When we graduate, we often stay at home for some time. Within this period, we are faced with a great puzzle, between going forward or going backward, between throwing our old identity for a new identity; here, some begin to regress going back to identity and expected conflict for role confusion; new self-concept is developed, some are faced with the discrepancy between their expectations in life and reality itself….Here, we find a lot of the ladies going for computer lessons, others going for tailoring school, others baking, and the rest, while the boys go in for painting, building works, tailoring, etc. However this new identity may put up, some are left behind with no  or little options to start something meaningful.These new found activities keep us busy and as time passes by we are being called up for National Youth Service Corp; most of us then abandon this new skill as it seem to us as thou what we have built was just temporal. We all move in for NYSC and the same EUPHORIA we had during our final year at college returns back.This NYSC lasts for a period of 1 year, bringing our thinking to a common pool to think only of NYSC and what it produces within the 1year period. As the months are fast approaching reaching to an end of the scheme, our anxieties begin to become heightened, our fear for the larger society begins to increase, our thoughts begin to open up to see how we can meet up with realities that the 19800 will no longer come our way, that the friends we had around us that made us felt like a community are all leaving to their various communities, pilling more and more anxieties on us. As this anxiety gets increased, we are being consoled with the fact that we have learned different cultures in the process, we have collected some contacts relevant enough to help us with a next chapter, and that we have called our uncles who seem to be somewhere as commissioners,  Permanent secretaries for our desired jobs; because of this mindset, we keep close short term ties with our uncles because they told us convincingly that they would be of help…… On returning back home, we are graciously welcomed by friends and family members, and we feel like kings and queens for the moment. After our arrival, we now begin to have this strange feelings. Our family members begin to communicate to us using signs and other things and we are expected to decipher. There we begin to understand the language and we begin to check through our schedules on a daily basis running to the cyber café trying to print our curriculum vitae, to make it available for our uncle, aunt, and even family friends who happen to be in the civil service and other productive sectors.After a while, some of us then think of going back to that tailoring school, others go back to catering, baking, etc. This continues as friends we used to have our gossip moments with begin to find a place for themselves, they begin to get engaged, they begin to open a new chapter; this adds up to our anxieties and we gradually become so hopeless and helpless. There are two sides to a story, those with the silver spoon get employed even before the NYSC terminates and we keep remembering that we were once with them but they have moved on; this increases our fear factor. Worst of our state of being is when our former compound mates Chinedu, Jennifer, Abdul, Mayowa, Eseoghene, Anieka, call us to tell us that they have gotten jobs with ICPC, NNPC, UniCalabar, LUTH, Federal Neuropsychiatry Sokoto; we begin to have nostalgia about the moments we had with them and this creates the gap naturally because of the advancement in social strata and class between Chinedu et al and us.Therefore, as these individuals begin to move further and we still are left behind, it takes a strong will to still integrate. We then begin to involve in discussions with great pessimism about the state of things, we begin to think that other people are after our progress and

count | 172

Life after NYSC and depression: Living in our present day realities – By Evans Binan