How do you stay sane when your gap year is just… staying home? 😭
I'm taking a gap year after school to prepare for an entrance exam, but I'm not hardcore studying yet. I've only recently started getting back into studying, and most of my day is still spent at home with not much going on.
My friends/cousins are in school or college, so they have somewhere to go, people around them, routines and things happening. I don't really have that right now. I'm basically stuck at home — I don't have anywhere I can realistically go, and there aren't really people around for me to interact with either.
My days can feel like I wake up, eat, sit around while time passes, study for a bit, eat, study at night, and sleep. There's very little variation from one day to the next 🥲
I actually didn't realise how much I'd miss having somewhere to go until I finished school. I didn't even particularly love school when I was there, but now I kind of wish I had that routine again.
There's also some difficult family stuff at home, especially with my father, so being at home all the time isn't always particularly comfortable either. I don't really want to go into the details, but it makes feeling stuck at home harder.
Sometimes I also get emotional and cry seemingly out of nowhere, and lately I've occasionally had thoughts about not wanting to be alive anymore. I don't have a plan or intention to act on them, but it's worrying me because I don't really understand where they're coming from.
For anyone who's had a similar gap year or period of being mostly stuck at home: how did you deal with the loneliness and the feeling that your life had become repetitive? What actually helped?
I genuinely want to hear from people who've been through something similar 🥲