Class of ’24 Frames

I never wanted to take a gap year.

It wasn’t an option that had ever been on the table. I was graduating high school in June of 2020, and then I was going to college in the fall. That was as fixed as the sun rising over the horizon day after day.

Then my high school postponed an economics summit hosting international students from China.

My mom brought up the topic for the first time at the beginning of March. It was offhand: “If this thing gets worse, you might want to think about taking a year off.” I brushed her words away. An overreaction.

Then it hit. Two weeks at home, then a month, then three. Suddenly, the end of my childhood was a ceremony without pomp, the catharsis of graduation thwarted by the cortisol of half an apocalypse. As I tell my friends now, I got all of high school — except the good part.

Somewhere in the pile of milestones turned inside out by that new reality was college. My parents pressured me to defer my admission, but I saw a gap year as an extension of the purgatory of that spring into a small eternity. Our fights punctured the eerily quiet fabric of a life on hold. As the deadline approached, it became clear they were not going to change their minds, and there was nothing more I could do.

The loss of control was terrifying. If I couldn’t stop one year from disappearing into the void of the pandemic, what would I do if Groundhog Day lasted two years? Three? I needed to reinvent myself, but I had no access to the person I was going to be, not yet. I looked at the calendar and saw only March 15, 2020. I relived the shift I’d worked that morning at Starbucks, my last memory of a world now frozen in an alien amber.

In February 2021, I drove to my high school’s parking lot and listened to songs that reminded me of senior year, trying to exhale. I still couldn’t.

Taking a gap year — not any gap year, but this gap year — felt like abdicating part of my identity. The pandemic was terrible for the class below us too, but they had time to prepare. We were blindsided; they were not. 2020 was our trauma, our bonding experience, our storm to weather. What happened to me when I put up an umbrella and waited for it to pass?

The semesters I missed, by all accounts, were awful. Those who stayed tell me I made the right choice, and I see why: Zoom school can’t hold a candle to the real thing. But as my long-awaited launch date approached, it felt wrong. When I left everyone behind, running away from the hollow mess of a year at college they endured together, I thought I’d lost the privilege of anticipation. I shoved that feeling so deep inside I could feel only its tremors on the surface.

But I couldn’t help but pinch myself the first time I set foot in Annenberg. I still went through five concentrations in three months. And I felt guilty — that with every inexperienced move, I was letting my true cohort fly further and further away.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t convince myself that I was living in the right timeline. Maybe it was grief — an amalgamation of denial and bargaining — or a coping mechanism, but starting in about April 2020, I’d daydream that none of it was real. I’d forget every deformed milestone, every night spent pacing my basement trying to psychoanalyze away the shot that destroyed my best-laid plans. The movie was over, and I was going to Harvard in the fall after graduating from high school, living the life I had pictured when the world made sense.

The dreams have come less frequently these days, as the chasm between reality and fantasy has widened, but they haven’t disappeared. Sometimes I let them stay a few extra seconds, just to feel the warmth.

I worry that the control I lost will never return, even when Covid-19 is a distant memory. This fear is a faint alarm in the back of my head. The conductor plays a slow diminuendo, but the drone goes on and on.

But as the strings draw out their single note, so too do I go on. I’m not the same person I would have been if things had happened the way I’d planned. There was no pause button, as much as I might have wished for one. I worked a full-time job, and spent a season at an intensive outdoor program. I’m in a different place than I envisioned I’d be when I applied to college, but I have new perspectives, new opportunities. Whether or not every part of the year was valuable, calluses are now embedded in the patchwork guiding me forward. I’m slowly learning to accept them, to grow comfortable with the contours of this new landscape I inhabit.

Two years ago, the future I’d imagined for myself imploded in 24 frames. Now, I shape my life from its ashes, in a world that bends on the whims of fortune more than I ever thought was possible.

Ian D. Svetkey ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Hurlbut Hall.