My struggles after graduating school

After I graduated from the German equivalent of high school, I originally planned on traveling to Australia before starting college. Then the pandemic hit and I couldn’t. However, I still wanted a change of pace. I wanted to get out of the rut I’d been in for the past couple of years. I wanted something new. I decided to go back to the Netherlands (where I was born) and work there for a year.

So, I packed my bags and traveled to the coast to go work as a waiter in a restaurant/surf school on the beach. I figured being a waiter was some chill job where you’d just goof around with new people all day and get paid for it, so that sounded fun. In my free time, I could go learn surfing and just in general live the good life.

That’s not exactly how it went. Turns out waiting is stressful and tiring. Surfing lessons weren’t as readily available as I thought. And I didn’t make friends with the other staff like I figured I would.

This meant that I spent my days off in the vacation home of my grandparents (where I was staying while I was working at the restaurant) alone and exhausted. To distract myself, I watched TV. A lot. I probably watched between six and twelve hours of TV on the days I didn’t work. Oh, and not regular TV, by the way. You see, my grandparents didn’t have very many channels, so I watched the news. For hours on end, I watched the same news channel (which, if you don’t know, consists of about 90% repeats). Which sucked. But sitting with my own thoughts would have been more uncomfortable. So, I kept watching.

I wasn’t a great waiter, either. I enjoyed talking to and joking with all the people, but I couldn’t figure out how to properly balance a tray on one hand. At least not when it was filled with seven tall glasses of beer. Because then it becomes quite heavy and, at the same time, not very stable. The tall glasses tip over quite easily. And when you take one glass from the tray, the center of gravity shifts. If you don’t properly adjust, it is not too hard to make a huge mess.

Of course, it was always embarrassing when that happened, but one time in particular was just awful. I had taken a glass from the tray, and the center of gravity shifted too far for me to be able to compensate. A tall glass full of beer started tipping over. I frantically tried to avoid having it spill, but I merely managed to change the direction it spilled in. Which now was directly into the handbag of the woman from the table right in front of me. She had placed it on the chair next to her, and it was amazingly capable of catching the entire 0.5 liters of beer I was spilling. I drenched her bag in beer. It was awful. I was like a soup of beer and her belongings swimming around in her bag.

So yeah, waiting wasn’t fun either. It went on for about a month until I finally said, “To hell with this; I’m miserable.”

A little before that, my uncle had made me a generous offer. He told me that, if I wanted, I could stay with him and work on the house he just bought. He’d pay me for it, too. He wanted some walls removed, and other small tasks like mowing the lawn and taking down a fence had to be done too. Since I was sick of being a waiter and didn’t want to move back in with my parents, I said sure.

So I was staying at his new house in a quiet little town near the coast, which was about a ten-minute drive from where my uncle lived. He told me the things he wanted to be done and the general order, but other than that, I was in complete control of when I worked, how I worked or how long I worked.

He checked in occasionally, but most of the time I was by myself. This was very new to me. Up till then, I had always lived with my parents, and that meant certain things were already taken care of (like food and an organized house) and other things were limited (like time I could spend playing video games or watching Netflix). Now all bets were off; I had much more freedom (which I loved), but with that also came a lot more responsibility (which I mostly ignored).

Here’s how a usual day for me went:

I got up late (maybe around 2 pm), immediately grabbed my phone, and watched some YouTube or Netflix for a while, then I begrudgingly got out of bed. I went downstairs, made something to eat (while I was still watching something on my phone), ate it while watching something on my phone (which therefore, of course, took forever), and then got up to do some work. I didn’t really want to work, but I had to do something. I usually worked for 45 minutes to maybe an hour and a half, then I went inside again to go watch some more stuff on my phone. I probably told myself something like, “I’m just going to take a quick break; I’ll do some more work soon.”

I had to tell myself this because deep down I knew how lazy I was being. So, I had to find an excuse for myself. Which was that I was just going to take a quick break.

It was never quick. It probably took me another couple of hours before I managed to start doing some work again. Which I did for maybe half an hour before going inside again and watching Netflix. Until three in the morning. After that, I finally went to sleep.

Work wasn’t the only thing I had trouble putting effort into. Feeding myself was another one. I did the bare minimum. Want to know what my diet consisted of? Okay, here’s what I did: I got a loaf of bread and sugary spreads to put on it. And that’s what I ate for three meals a day (and for snacks). Just plain bread with cookie butter or peanut butter on it. Every now and then, when I wanted some variety, I ate very sweet cereal. That’s it.

I didn’t even have a plate to put my bread on. There weren’t any plates in the house yet, and I didn’t care enough to ask my uncle to bring some. So, whenever I was hungry, I put a slice of bread on the plastic wrapper it came in, put a lot of cookie butter on it with the one knife I had, folded it and ate it. Probably standing, watching something on my phone. That’s also why I didn’t care about things like “Do I have plates?” I was just too numb and distracted.

The thing is, I didn’t really notice how bad I was doing. After all, I was working very hard to avoid precisely such uncomfortable questions. However, other people definitely took notice.

Here’s one time in particular I remember:

It was late one evening, and I sat in the living room watching something. It was dark out. But since I had probably been sitting there since before it got dark, I hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on. The entire house was dark. But since my phone produced its own light, I didn’t care. I just needed to be able to watch my show. So, I just sat there. Hunched over in a plastic lawn chair (there was no real furniture yet), in a corner of a dark house, being absorbed by something I watched on my little phone screen.

When my uncle came, he was mortified. He said it was one of the saddest things he’s seen. Me watching something in the dark, in a little corner of the house because I didn’t even care enough to turn on the lights. He got concerned about me. Which I didn’t like. He wanted to know if I was doing okay. Which made it a lot harder for me to pretend like I was.

So, to avoid facing some difficult questions, I moved again. This time I went somewhere far away from anyone I knew.

Things got worse there. I still had all of my bad habits, like getting up late and doing jack shit, but I also went from having few social interactions to basically none. My need for distraction got worse, too. I basically didn’t stop watching Netflix unless absolutely necessary. Doing the dishes? With one eye, I was watching Friends. Putting on my shoes to go to the grocery store? Probably catching up with the Peaky Blinders (a Netflix show).

I was never really bored. I just lived a despondent, numb existence.

Unsurprisingly, my mental state got worse. My life had basically morphed into one part of my brain screaming at me, “You are wasting your time and your life; wake up and change before it’s too late!” and the other part clinging to more and more desperate attempts to avoid having to listen to that voice.

Until I couldn’t run from it any longer. And it came crashing down on me. I had to face it: I felt horrible, and it kept getting worse. Something had to change because this just couldn’t go on.