All my efforts for as long as I can remember have been directed towards getting into college. Enticed by the possibilities that could flourish from four years of liberal arts, I did what a jittery, enthusiastic high school student would do: Get straight As! Embark on a handful of extracurricular activities! (Ideally, ten times more than a normal human can commit to!) Volunteer! Save the world from impending doom! And when all attempts fail, aggrandize the experience and make it the topic of your admission essays!

When acceptance letters from universities came pouring in, I felt my future becoming concrete.

Then COVID-19 came. I watched my dreams deflate slowly but surely. The first blow came in the last weeks of high school, in the guise of a one-week class suspension. By the end of the week, the disruption had been extended to a month. High schools were forced to graduate their students, and we were left with no choice but to don the title of incoming college freshmen in the middle of a pandemic.

A few months later, my prospective university deemed it impossible to hold classes on-site. I thought about the intellectuals and martyrs from previous generations strutting down the red brick campus of Ateneo, exploring the possibilities before them, while I, a victim of egregious times, had to watch things flicker faintly from my laptop monitor. 

My first instinct: take a gap year. But uncertainties had left me frozen and confused. What would I do for a year? In the middle of a global health crisis? And was I willing to defer my graduate school plans? My parents and I ultimately decided that enrolling — and pretending that everything was just fine — was the best option.

It only took a semester at Zoom University to dispel this, incidentally around the time I turned 18. I only realized then how precious my teenage years actually were. What was I even thinking? Graduate school — really? I’d become so preoccupied with college, with my idealized vision of it (like a college pamphlet tableau: students — ethnic, most especially — laughing while carrying stacks of books), and the vagueness that would come after it. As Marina Keegan had put it, “We’re so young. We’re so young.” I was so consumed by the future and the fear of missing out that I’d failed to live here, now. 

By February, my frustration had solidified. Taking a gap year was an unheard of path here in the Philippines, but I was determined to forge my own. It took me a while to plan my activities (besides, what could a gapper possibly do amid quarantine?), but in the end, things finally fell into the right places. I was happy, a feeling I didn’t quite recognize at once, after 14 years of general education, capped by an unprecedented health crisis.

Right after my dean approved my deferral, I started my blog to chronicle my experience and possibly inspire other Filipinos to do the same. 

So much has happened since then. At the moment, I’m working in the publishing industry for the longest-running literary and culture magazine here in the Philippines; it’s a pursuit in and of itself, and one that would be funding the other endeavors I’d scheduled for the latter half of the year. Had I not taken a gap year and forced myself to endure, I would’ve missed this opportunity.

But the achievement I’m most proud of by far is that I’ve been sleeping for more than eight hours now. The high school version of me could never. 

The pandemic has caused us to miss out on important moments as young college students. I’d always imagined walking across my campus for the first time, music playing in the background, as if I were the protagonist of a coming-of-age film. Parties. Breakdowns. Parties again. They were all irredeemable milestones. But if anything, I would rather miss out on these now while I do other things that matter to me, at my own pace, on my own terms. 

Taking a gap year has allowed my purview to widen. And I’ve decided that the goal is not merely college, but to live through the madness the world offers and not take it for granted. I’ve learned so much. And I’m sure I will be learning so much more. – Rappler.com

Allan “AJ” Raymundo Jr., 18, is an Interdisciplinary Studies freshman at the Ateneo de Manila University. He’s a Filipino ambassador to Gapyearly, a community of gappers all across the globe. He runs the blog AJ Unleashed.

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