Let me say it once and for all, mostly because you probably haven’t heard it enough times: you are permitted to live.

You were terrified of the thought of a gap year, I have taken notice since our last conversation. You were petrified by your very own choice to consciously take a career break while everyone else was scrambling for a job. Your brain still freezes every time you register (and re-register) that you decided to buy yourself a pause when everyone was moving on, or forced to move along, the one-way progression of life. It was because you didn’t actually purchase it, did you? You didn’t have anything to buy it with; you didn’t earn it. You simply rented it, and that put a tremendous amount of pressure on your future shoulders. The transaction is not approved yet until you can pay off your debts. You are not authorized to live yet, you think.

You didn’t pull a six-figured yearly salary prior to spending these unstructured hours, nor did you accrue a jaw-dropping amount of assets sitting in an obscure boutique bank account. Half of what you’re worth is still the leftover interests of your parents’ investment in you; how dare you live for yourself on a rented life?

You weren’t taught to be entitled to things; your version of God didn’t give you the inviolate right to be a human. Things going your way was a forbidden wish, one that could only be granted by the capricious genie in a bottle nowhere to be found. Getting what you wanted could only be earned, not given.

For you, the default state has always been that you didn’t deserve what you asked for. So how dare you live for yourself now, grasping onto an empty bottle of wishes?

The first quarter of your life has been spent on earning your place. If you did the chores, you’d get your screen time. If you followed the rules, screams and insults wouldn’t land on your face. If you got big red marks on pieces of paper, you’d get to go outside and play. Another bonus is that kids would finally respect you instead of treating you like the effeminate piece of sissy trash you were and trampling on you. If you acted more in line, you’d be off the hook, free of chastising. If you received scholarships, everyone would be more amenable to your request to leave the land that despised you. If you obtained an internship early on, you could go out to a restaurant without crippling guilt. If you found a high-paying job and became an economically productive migrant, you deserved to breathe foreign air. If you spoke their language and pretended that their way of life has always been yours, you’d be treated with dignity, unlike a second-class citizen who “refused to fit in” and would eventually have to return to a land where being yourself was an unspoken mental crime. Equality was not something you could be given unless you fought hard enough; you were taught to earn your place.

Up until this point, you were ingrained with the thought that your existence and needs must be justified with some form of effort; neither were inherently legitimate.

How could you live for yourself, especially as you weren’t taught to fathom that?

So here I am, telling you that you have the permission to live. You weren’t taught this, so you must learn it.

Learn to live a little, day by day, for yourself. You can still enjoy life even though you are on your career break. Your right to live is not premised on your productivity like capitalism tells you so. You can sit in the park for a little bit longer than your anxious mind allows. You look nice when the slanted sunlight washes over your face. Your late afternoon can’t make you late in life. You can slouch a little bit on that couch while Laufey carries you away into the clouds. You can wrap yourself in her silky voice and nap on your indecision about dinner. Day by day, you prescribe a handful of unstructured hours to remain unstructured. You don’t attempt to assemble them like a piece of IKEA furniture, something that’s potentially handy but gives you too much back pain. Your life is not an ensemble of furniture to be pieced together and serve a particular purpose. You are not here to serve a particular purpose. You can live a little bit, doing what you do, without having to justify your actions.

You have to learn to live for yourself because no one else can give you that permission except for me, and I’m the only one left who won’t collect rent from you.