Stuff happens to us everyday that we don’t expect. If we deal with it, life is sure to continue. The only way out is through, and a law I live by is that if I keep moving in a forward direction, I'm sure to get somewhere eventually. Sometimes the place we arrive at isn’t the one we expected, but it’s the one we’re at regardless. Accepting this isn’t always (or ever) easy, but it’s also the only way to cope.

Confidence is an important attribute to maintain at times in your life where you feel vulnerable, though it seems counterintuitive. Maintaining a positive outlook and a healthy lifestyle within your current means is imperative to your success. It's beyond difficult to watch everyone carry on normally while you struggle to maintain a good outlook, but being part of a group and feeling like you belong can be helped so greatly by continuing to experience simple joys in life to encourage stability while you work to remain driven. At the risk of being too vague, difficult choices that can have a huge impact on your life are obviously hard to make.

For example, watching my peers go back to college when I'm taking a gap year makes me feel left out and discombobulated, because my path veers from what I thought it might be a year ago. I tried to ignore the feeling for a while, but it's hard to ignore all the "back to school" commercials and merchandise. Taking a year off after sixteen years of school is inevitably going to feel awkward and you'll feel out of place, like you took a misstep. Thinking I'm out of the loop, and having that fear of missing out in one aspect of my life is scary, but I know a gap year is a sacrifice and a gamble.

At the same time, watching my progress in the understanding of my situation is encouraging. While I can grasp that I'm still young and it won't be so weird going back to school and being in a different graduating class, there's still residual hesitations and concerns I experience, which is normal. Integrating in a community hasn't ever been a strength of mine, so I'm worried I won't connect as well upon returning.

I have faith in my abilities to improve my social skills, and hopefully I can use newly found talents in the future to address my concerns. This gap year is a necessity and I'm happy for the opportunity, hesitations are only natural, and do pass. For whatever reason you might have for taking a gap year, rest assured it's not all that big a jump in the grand scheme of things, despite the gravity the decision might appear to have right now. Life is long, and one year off to experience life not in college isn't such a bad thing.