My boring year off

My name is Rachel and I am a 19 year old from NSW, Australia. This blog is about what happened to me in 2011- my "gap" year.

I graduated from high school in September 2010, and 2011 has been my year off from education. The town I live in doesn't have many offers for jobs going, unless you count McDonalds and all the other fast food chains that plague every city, and I refuse to work at one... again. As a result I have had an entire year filled with doing whatever I like day in and day out.

I admit this may sound wonderful, but when you factor in the lack of friends (turns out smart, sarcastic people aren't always appreciated) it can actually be horribly, depressingly boring. Almost every day of this year I have woken up with absolutely nothing to do besides the morning washing up, which was always there for me. And to convey how little it was I had to do, know that for a while I found myself looking forward to doing it. Pretty pathetic...

This has given me an idea of what retirement will be like, and I have to say I'm horrified. How can I be expected to live years of my life with nothing to do when I could barely stand the one? How is it that retirees can stand it? Because playing bowles and doing the gardening do not appeal to me in anyway, and that's all most of them seem to do. 

On top of the vast nothingness that slowly ticked a year of my life away, my boyfriend and I constantly had problems that we tried to work through. I was alright with breaking up though, as he moved away to start work and I was ready to move on.

I wonder if I'm one of a minority who look forward to starting a career. Is it really so weird to want to spend my days working when I'll be in a job I like? I learned that I'm the kind of person who needs something constructive to do or I go mad.

That was another problem I faced this year. Back in January I had no idea what career I wanted to pursue. I graduated without a clue of where I would be that time next year. I was dreading the possibility that I would still be sponging off my mother and spending every single day on the computer. At that point university was not an option, as I was afraid it would just be a larger version of high school. 

I'm not 100% sure why, but people in high school had a tendency to hate me- even if I did nothing to them. I'm over it now, but at the time it was really frustrating. I just didn't want to go to a place where thousands more people would be doing that too. I realised though that university would be full of people who truly want to learn (and aren't being forced to) and that the weirdos like me would most likely be in the majority. And since I would be choosing special subjects, those people and I would share common interests. 

I then found a course that I would like to do, and had to suffer through the fears of rejection until a few days ago, when I found out that I was accepted!! I will be moving out from home early next year, and have to deal with the much less paralyzing fear that I won't be good at my courses.


But as boring as this year off was, I found out a lot about myself. That's right, it was all some fantastic journey of self-discovery..... just kidding. I did learn some stuff though, like my opinion on matters such as: gay marriage, abortion, religion, etc, and those (and then some) will be the topics of my clumsy attempts at blogs.


Well that's all for now folks, thanks for reading :)