Gap Year

I failed! I'm a failure!!!

Every mental health episode I’ve experienced since graduating high school is karmic punishment for looking down on the concept of gap years as a tween. The phrase ‘burn out’ hadn’t been introduced to me yet and I was convinced that my three-hours-of-sleep-per-night, body-physically-shaking-from-anxiety-half-the-day, four-shots-of-espresso-just-to-remain-cognitively-functional, repress-every-trauma-so-it-can’t-affect-me lifestyle would sustain me throughout college. It didn’t. I had depressive (possibly bipolar… looking into the process of getting tested/diagnosed for a mood disorder) and ocd episodes long enough and with enough frequency that it took me an extra 1.5 years to finish my undergraduate degree. By all accounts, I should’ve taken a gap year before beginning college.

However, everything happens for a reason, and I wouldn’t be who I am today, nor hold the knowledge and experiences I have now if I’d stayed in New Hampshire for an extra year. And at the time, it wasn’t necessarily a safe or healthy environment for me to be in. So it’s good that I got away. Then again, being sixteen in what should legally be a foreign country and completely on my own, was also, in hindsight, maybe not the safest situation. My parents still don’t know about the time someone tried to traffic me, and it’s probably for the best that they never do. But that’s distracting me from the main point.

2025 was my belated gap year. And what a gap year it was! I have been put through the ringer in every conceivable way, and there’s not an aspect of my personality or belief systems that hasn’t been irrevocably shifted. I started January incredibly hopeful and excited, with so many ideas in my head about what the coming year would bring and how greatly my life would improve. But these were glossy childhood ideals, a surface level understanding of myself and what would make me happy. I’d been doing so much introspection while in New Hampshire in late 2024, and had almost settled on the idea that moving to Florida wasn’t a necessity anymore, but the lease was signed and a younger version of myself had dreamed of living near Disney World for a prolonged period of time, so I couldn’t back down. I had to commit to the move. And I kept telling myself that the move would “fix me,” as if I wasn’t on a more healing path during the beginnings of a New England winter.

I stopped the introspection. I cut off the newer levels of self-awareness/understanding. And I moved to Florida with the manic mantra that I was finally going to be Happy… which is an insane thing to believe about the state of Florida.

The universe was screaming at me that this wasn’t the place for me before I even began the drive down, as my lease date kept getting pushed back. We showed up at the apartment and it had never been cleaned from the previous resident. There were dirt and dead bugs all over the floors and in the dishwasher. The dryer was broken, as were our shower heads and curtain rods. I’m not kidding when I say I immediately asked to just go back to NH. Reality set in, I had a brief moment where I allowed myself to realize that the desires of a former self were no longer relevant, and to make matters worse, my poor roommate immediately caught the flu. I wanted to go ‘home.’

I needed to be brave, though. I needed to be an adult. So I told myself (and others) that I was going to make it work, and I threw myself into job searching. I’d transferred movie theaters from my location up in New Hampshire to one that was, in theory, a forty-five minute drive from where I’d just moved in Florida. Because of Florida construction and shitty drivers, it averaged an hour and a half. Management asked me every shift if I wanted to become bar-trained. Every shift, I told them, “yes!” They’d promptly forget and would ask me again my next day there. The person in charge of scheduling had a silly habit of giving me hours exclusively the one day a week I said I couldn’t work. I’d taken a paycut when I moved states and was making $2 less per hour for the same job I’d been working since I was sixteen. And on top of everything else, after my coworkers found out I was bisexual, a handful of them started referring to me as a d*ke. After a few months of enduring the commute and the poor management, I’d secured a second job that I liked much better (a shocking statement because movie theaters are my favorite place to be, sans a beach perhaps.) I also had another job lined up to start in May, so I knew I was close to putting in my two weeks at the movie theater. I ended up quitting on the spot after I reported a coworker to a manager about the whole calling-me-a-slur thing and they told me they didn’t have time for that.

The job I was supposed to start in May ended up not working out. My OCD took over. I cannot be a lifeguard, because of the obsessions. From day one of training I knew it wouldn’t work because I had a panic attack at 8am as they showed us a video of a child drowning. Once we actually got in the pool my behavior was erratic and overzealous, and I kept jumping in to save objects that simply weren’t there. I was earnestly seeing things in the shadows of the pool because I am hypervigilant, but the alternative would be to be calm, and that could lead to someone dying. And if someone died while I was supposed to be guarding them, I would kill myself. I genuinely would not be able to live if someone died on my watch. I had to leave the role, and Disney (it was supposed to be a job at one of the waterparks) didn’t have any other roles open to transfer me to. So I was stuck with the one job, and no matter how many applications I put in at jobs in the area, I rarely got interviews, and when I have, they have led to nowhere. I even reapplied to another movie theater closer to me that was hiring during blockbuster season in the summer, but I never heard back from them, despite my 7 years of experience with the company.

I’ve been scraping by to make ends meet every month, inappropriately and impulsively charging things to my parents’ credit card so that my paychecks can go exclusively to the double-whammy of rent and a too-big student loan payment. And like, thank god I have the ability to do that. But I feel like a major fucking failure considering when I was a sixteen-year-old living on my own in Hawaii, I paid for everything myself, and on the rare occasion I used their card to purchase something, I mailed my mother a check for that amount within the month. Now, I call her and she goes over the bill of what I spent and I go over the list of what jobs I applied to and what extra shifts I picked up. I was supposed to be making enough money to explore Orlando more, yet I’ve barely even gone to Disney, and I get in for free there.

By the time July rolled around, I couldn’t hide the severity of my depression from others, or from myself. I had to acknowledge that I was in a bad place. But there wasn’t much I could do about it, so I continued to do what I’d done for months/years, which was latch onto any surface level moment of happiness and try to create a longer sensation out of it. It doesn’t really work, but it keeps others from bothering me more about my mental health. If there’s nothing to be done, then what’s the point in having people list things to be thankful for at me. I literally write a list nightly of what I’m grateful for from throughout my day. It’s not as if I’m not thankful/appreciative of things. I’m just also fucking miserable.

I had a moment of wild fucking acceptance in August, and stopped trying to make Florida work for me. I let myself acknowledge that it wouldn’t be healthy for me to stay after my lease is up, and I started looking forward to the new year and all the things that would be happening for me in 2026. I tried (and am trying) to be more grounded and realistic about life, and about how a location won’t fix my mental health, but I am also aware that certain locations cannot possibly make me worse, and after a long weekend in NH in the summer, I knew that as an adult, New England is a far better place for me than Florida. That might not have been the case as a teenager, but it certainly is now. I miss the culture desperately.

Besides things just not working out for me, one of the ways in which Florida has been rotting my insides slowly is that the worst of humanity congregate here. It’d be one thing if it was just political, which is bad enough but at least I was expecting it. But oh my god half of these people have never interacted with other human beings before. Every damn day I deal with entitled fucking idiots and I can literally feel myself becoming an angrier and less forgiving person and I Hate that. I don’t want to be bitter. But I am a raging fucking bitch!

At my customer service job, besides the usual idiocy of people on vacation, and besides the oft-complained-about married men who hit on me, there was also a three-month period where boy-toddlers were hitting me. That’s the full statement. Several little boys smacked me while at work or at the parks, and the literal best/most valid response was a mother apologizing to me. No chastising the kid. Just apologizing to me. The more common response was ignoring it, which is crazy. And the wildest was a grandmother looking at me and going “did he just hit you?” and me going “yes…” and her just sighing. That was the full interaction! Ma’am you’re lucky I don’t hit you in return cuz what on god’s green earth???

This was happening around the same time as my coworkers at the job I liked deciding it would be fun to spread a rumor that I was sleeping with one of the managers. I didn’t get to find out that this was going on until several months later, when I simultaneously found out that the rest of the managers also knew that this was going around, and no one thought to inform me. I had finally started to be able to enjoy my time in Florida, I had reached a vague state of relaxation as I knew that I only had to endure a few more months of the ‘gunshine state’ (if I have to see one more unironic t-shirt that says that I’m gonna vomit), and while I still wasn’t ~happy~ per say, I was able to breathe a little easier, and then I find out that I am once again being sexually harassed at my place of employment. It pretty much ruined the few friendships I’d been trying to cultivate as I have no idea how widely spread that rumor was/is, and I kept trying to rehearse how to go about bringing up the problem to management, but with that tactic backfiring at my prior job, plus the fact that no matter what I tried I ended up rage-crying while practicing my speech, I gave up on trying to seek justice over that particular gripe. I couldn’t risk losing my singular job in this horrid job market, plus I didn’t want to make my shifts feel any more uncomfortable than they already did after that came to light, so I’ve just been letting that fester in my soul since October.

But it’s almost the new year, I’m moving back to New Hampshire soon, and I’ve started actually prepping myself for the new year, for my goals and hopes and dreams and wants. I feel as though I’m starting 2026 on a stronger foot than 2025, because while everything was happening this year, I also learned a lot more about myself. My defense mechanisms and few childhood beliefs that I’d held onto into adulthood have been broken down to the point that they were eliminated and I finally got a peek into my heart without those giant walls around it. And I am working on understanding and keeping track of what actually makes me happy, and what actually makes me excited to get up in the morning. I didn’t let myself Dream for a long time, trying to keep my Wants in a manageable and realistic place as opposed to being lofty and True as they were when I was a toddler. If anything, I’m learning to reject 14-year-old me and embrace 4-year-old me. You’re never more yourself than you are before you learn shame, and I’m trying to let go of a lot of my shame before the year ends.

This year was one giant failure. I failed at genuinely every single one of my New Year’s goals, even the easy & immeasurable ones like “stretch more.” I failed at making the most of my Disney Parks free admission. I failed at working on my social media addiction, I failed at making new friends, I failed at finding and keeping jobs, I failed at exploring Florida, and I failed at all the progress I’d made in therapy in 2024. I was so miserable about this failure until I figured out how to reframe it. 2025 was my gap year. My post-collegiate year of figuring my shit out. And as much pain and suffering as I went through this year, I did largely figure my shit out. People take gap years after high school so that they can learn who they are and who they want to be before committing to a path. 2025 was not at all what I thought or wanted it to be. But as we approach the end of the year, I do feel like I have the strongest understanding of myself I have ever had. I need to work on things, and especially work on keeping that connection to myself strong, but I feel as though I can, for the first time, honestly say that I know myself. I have an image in my mind and it’s no longer blurry. I got a prescription to view myself with a clearer lens.

I wish I could look back at my full year with as much clear vision as I can now see internally, but unfortunately, the mental health episodes do block out weeks-at-a-time. It’s not as though my time here has been all bad anecdotes and pain, but I know some of the happier memories involve me masking how I felt beneath the surface, and that creates an odd blur. Plus there are genuine gaps in my memory as I cannot remember how certain months passed by so quickly or at all. It’s good to be able to recognize, however, that this is not an average symptom of depression, and that a lot of my friends who also struggle with it don’t experience it the same way as I do. My gap year has also been the final push in me reckoning with the likelihood that I have some sort of mood disorder, and I can search for better answers on that in the new year. It gives me a strong starting point for my journey through 2026.

And I’ll be starting 2026 completely rebirthed. As I’m stubborn and often slow-to-change — much more happily existing within my comfort zones than I am garnering new experiences — while I’ve been continuing my prepping and planning for a solid start to a new year, I’ve still been holding onto some past ties. With every earnest aspiration I make for myself and my evolution further into adulthood, I also kept trying to hold tightly to my favorite old ones. But that is not what the universe wants for me, and like the baby bird I am, in order to allow myself to fly, it’s decided it’s last trick of 2025 is to throw me head-first out of the nest.

While I’ve been planning the move back to New Hampshire, I’ve been operating entirely under the impression that I’ll be back working at my old movie theater — the location I worked for seven years before moving to Florida and having a bad experience with the company. I was planning all my extracurricular aspirations around knowing exactly how they do scheduling there, and most of my friendships around seeing people at work. Rather pompously, I was expecting the welcome wagon when I emailed my old manager, but instead of being told that I’d have a shift waiting for me on my very first day of availability back, I was informed that I could not be rehired due to how I left the Florida location.

When I explained the circumstances of me quitting, my email was forwarded to corporate who informed me that there is no appeals process, but if I send them documented names, dates, and witnesses of the incidences in which I was harassed (all the way back in April), they will do their best to investigate for me. Which isn’t necessarily helpful in any capacity. So I will be returning to New England with no job prospects — a completely clean slate for the first time since I was sixteen. And while it initially felt like a rug was pulled out from under me (and in many ways, still kind of feels that way), I’m also starting to view it as refreshing. I am forced to forge into new experiences; I am forced to commit to a new sense of self. And it is every bit as exciting as it is frustrating.

It wasn’t my at the forefront of my intentions to take a gap year, but I think perhaps my subconscious knew all along that’s what I was doing. Whenever someone asked what brought me to Florida, I didn’t have an answer. Months passed, and I couldn’t figure out a soundbite to give people. I’d flounder and I’d ramble on, trying to justify (more to myself than anyone else) just what exactly I was doing here. Eventually, the phrase ‘gap year’ popped into my mind, and I held space with it. That is traditionally the year in which people flounder. It is the year between education tracks (and in many ways, this is also the year between education tracks for me, as I’d love to go back to school as soon as possible), and the year of major leaps in self discovery. In recent months, I started telling whoever asked that I was in Florida for my gap year, and it’s felt so much more comforting and accurate. This was never the place for me to plant roots, only the place for me to weed out some rot. And now my gap year is coming to a close, and I feel excited for the new year to begin with a higher sense of self.