on sophomore slump, and the facebook marketplace brain market

There was an impression in my mind for a long time that gap years were a bad idea, they were something you fell into if you didn't have your shit together. Maybe it was an outlook I got from my parents, pathologizing as more than what it was, a plea for me to get out of the house. What would I do with a gap year anyways? The shame churns in my high school senior mind until I fall into going to university straight out of high school. For once it was the correct thing, what you did. When you don't get your license right away, you don't make an income, you keep doing school, you did that right the first few times.

What would I have done with a gap year? My first thought and why there was a logical element to it to begin with is that I would spend it doing fuck-all, something I was all too familiar with from many-a-summer watching YouTube and finding a new hobby project every few weeks to keep my mind away from life. So what I was afraid of wasn't without precedent, I had never proven myself otherwise so why would it change? You can see the pattern, and I think I even saw it at the time. Buuuut I had a trick up my sleeve.. college!

With Obsidian note-taker in toe, I arrive for my liberal arts classes and have a solid first semester. It was working, in one fell swoop I fixed my sleep schedule, my social media addiction, I was seeing my girlfriend at the time weekly if not more. I held B's and A-'s that whole semester, similar to high school but giving me confidence in my decision. I was somewhat ready for life, maybe I'll just live in a city and not need a license, who knows.

I kept up this general path until the midpoint of the second semester where, missing tons of classes and tons of meals, I slipped up and was back inside of the brain I grew up with. I may have called it depression at the time but in recent times I've started to just see the decisions outlined in this post as very naive. In a similar way during my Sophomore year I had a solid first semester, and barely scraped by my second semester.

Why do I think a gap year would have done me good? In my experience its incredibly difficult to actually do badly in high school barring outside factors. The high school experience is set on a metronome, you may miss an assignment here or there but you tap your foot and get back into the groove and the concepts are simple enough that you can kind of just run it and do exceedingly well. Its a common remark in talking about Gen Z that they don't know how to read, and I can concur if I really wanted to I did NOT have to read Pride and Prejudice or The Great Gatsby to pass that ("college level") English class. That being said, I did and can in turn read things (awesome). In saying this, I want to bring light to a big cliche about college that unfortunately the fascists in my life were right about.. I seriously was not ready for a professor to not give a fuck about getting me caught up if I was inconsistent in speaking to them.

Okay but get to the point why a gap year? Hindsight is easy, but maybe I spend that gap year fucking off and doing nothing in particular. In doing so, I would be coming to this conclusion with 0 dollars out of my pocket, and out of the pocket of a me 40 years into the future. College should not be the place to learn about how out of whack your daily life is, and its scary to think with tens of thousands of dollars down the hole, I successfully learned about collective action problems, and got mad at people walking too slowly down the street.

I suppose I could have withdrawn after I realized it didn't work for me, and with a threat of suspension based on my horrid performance at the latter half of my second semester here, I was told to by multiple deans at the school. Shame is the reason for why I didn't. I really have the same brain as I did when I decided to come to university.