This week’s word is VISA, and it and I did not get along. I tried writing this three separate times, and finally am just posting one so I don’t have to look at it. I used the word as a travel visa, and we are following Andy, who decided to take a gap year, and does not regret it.
It wasn’t until you tried to pack everything you needed for a year into two suitcases that you realized how much stuff you had, and how little of it was really necessary.
It had started a few months ago with early acceptance into the ivy league, and a sense of overwhelming dread at hopping out of the frying pan and straight into the fire.
By the time her friends had gotten their acceptances, she had already quietly deferred her own start date, acquired a work vise, and made a plan for her gap year as well as a story to sell it all to her parents.
It was the best decision she had ever made, not because she enjoyed it, she hated every second of it from travelling alone, to the hostel living , to the part time job she had tutoring English as a second language.
Suddenly a career path that involved living out of a suitcase seemed like a prison sentence rather than a dream job, and the lie of using the trip to ‘find herself’ went from being something she told nosy people to a reality.
While everyone told her she was throwing away her future, she knew that if she went now, all she would be doing was throwing away her time and money in pursuit of a degree she wouldn’t use, and after all, it was her life to waste, wasn’t it?
Anne McSommers' Writing Nook 