Post-university, I loved my newfound freedom. I worked a job that I could leave at work, I spent hours with my friends, and then I moved to Italy to pursue la dolce vita. I found it easier than anticipated to move on from the heady university glory days. Life sans full-time education, as it turned out, was sweet. 

That was until March 2020, when I found myself back in the UK, living with my parents and hit by a wave of nostalgia in Lidl’s cheese aisle. I was standing in the supermarket consulting my list when the white bag of their “Simply… cheddar” caught my eye. Instantly, I was transported back to every university flat I had ever stepped foot in over the course of four years. Written somewhere in the university code is a clause that at least one flat mate, at any one time, must hold a bag of this cheese in their possession. The clause also states that said flatmate should never use the entire bag of cheese. Instead, it should remain in the fridge until slightly wet with perspiration. 

At the end of a hard day’s slog in the library, I would frequently return home to individual strands of the cheese scattered on the floor, becoming hard as they dried out. Rather than cleaning it up, because cleaning up after your university flatmates is, like, illegal, I would tiptoe round avoiding the cheese carefully, squirming if it even brushed my socked foot. It was grim, but it was a simpler time. 

During lockdown, I have been taken aback by the all-consuming nostalgia of university. I only finished a year ago, but already I feel like a fifty-year-old mother reminiscing about the good old days. When my Mum and Dad dropped me off at my halls five years ago, Mum exclaimed at least three times that it smelt “just the same” as when she had been there thirty years earlier. I smiled, nodded, and thought it seemed a bit extra to get so worked up over the smell of cleaning products. Now that smell would floor me. The mere sight of a bag of cheese is an emotional overload, so adding another sense into the equation might cause an actual breakdown in Lidl. 

For the first two years of university, I bummed around seven days a week. I did minimal work and lounged about in the library café enjoying leisurely three-hour lunch breaks with my mates. Once, I made my friend’s birthday card at a library desk, which involved cut-out pictures of our heads being chased by a hand drawn shark. You just can’t get away with that when you graduate. Sure, I could do it, but I no longer have the excuse of being a student. Back then, I could justify pretty much anything with, “I’m a student.” If I missed three lectures because I was going from supermarket to supermarket to find a certain type of garlic bread for a potluck, it didn’t matter, for I was a student. (Disclaimer: this is an inadvisable use of time, garlic bread is all the same). Explaining doing sweet, sweet nothing as a grad is a more complex matter. It makes you look lazy and like you have lost your way. Would people take kindly upon me drawing a picture of a cartoon shark chasing two girls in a public place knowing I was doing nothing else with my life? Suddenly, it becomes slightly less quirky and slightly more pitiful. 

Over the past year, I have worked a variety of jobs that are a far cry from my dream job. I’ve been a shop assistant, a waitress at a catering company, and a rowing coach on a zero-hours contract. When people asked me what I was doing with my life, I would quickly explain that I had just graduated, was working in shop, but was planning to move to Italy to teach English as soon as I had the funds. Why wasn’t I content with just explaining that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and was quite happy working around and mixing it up until I figured it out? There is nothing wrong with that, but I felt like that answer wasn’t good enough. There is so much pressure to know where we are going that we can lose the space to figure it out amongst worrying that we haven’t. 

The title of student gives us a mask to hide the fact that we don’t yet know who we are. Graduating from university doesn’t mean we have graduated from growing up. It marks the end of our educational journey and the beginning of our personal discovery. I felt like I knew myself better at university than I do now, but I have been stripped of my mask that justifies this feeling. At university, having no plans is admirable and exciting. The idea of the world deciding your fate is romanticised. As a graduate, the romance disintegrates as people pity you for not knowing. It’s difficult to be okay with feeling a little lost when it feels like society disapproves. Maybe my nostalgia isn’t really for Lidl’s own brand grated cheese, but the safety net of student life and the ready-made story that comes with it.

As it turns out, forging your own story is trickier than it seems, especially in the midst of a pandemic. While I continue to ponder my very being in the abyss of life post-university, at least Lidl can be proud of the depth of sentiment behind their grated cheese.

Sophie Parsons is a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh with a degree in French, dreaming of living in Italy soon.