Here: I’ll be writing rather than making a video about a gap year/college transition. I understand there’s information on gap years but not a lot is spoken about the transitions. I share this story to share an experience, and a perspective.
Some back story, my good friend Rocio and I recently took a gap year with a program. We had the opportunity to travel to Thies region, Senegal (rocio) and Florianopolis, Brasil (me) for about seven months. While in country we were fortunate to meet fantastic people who later became long time friends, live with a host family, learn native languages of the country, as well explore our environments. The one thing I think was most important to me was having the time, space, and opportunity to learn about ourselves in all perspectives of life. We began the journey after high school to sit down and discover, listen, and appreciate ourselves, our mental and emotional healths, and much more.
So as we imagined, the transition was not easy. We’ve had multiple discussions about how we’re feeling about it, about how we’re adjusting to this academic environment after being away from schoolwork for more than 12 months. Our minds we’re in a whole other world. I speak for myself when I say, I had disconnected from my everyday life, routine, family, and relationships to move to a new country, alone, and do something I’ve never done before. We had gotten accustomed to getting out of our old high school routines, and began spending time having important conversations, exploring our innerselves (as cliche as that sounds, it’s true), we had so much time on our hands.
Transitioning from that mindset to an academic routine, social life, and still finding time to take care of ourselves is harsh and challenging. Sometimes we find ourselves falling back into some old and bad habits we had in high school, and when we’re getting to those points where we have to stop and remind ourselves about the truth in finding balance. As my friend Rocio cleverly says, “redefining our relationship with academia”. That quote has been in my mind all semester, because college is new- it's something we’ve never done before. So we’re going to try and fail, we’re going to cry, and stress about assignments and exams, but we also have found the powerful meaning in taking care of ourselves- physically, spiritually and most importantly emotionally and mentally.
akin dorm window view
rocio.