I dropped out of my university in my first year. I was a music major, and my orchestra director set up a gofundme so that family and friends and teachers from my old high school could all get together to purchase an instrument for me I can use in school because my family was broke and couldn’t afford it. But I stayed at home instead of living on campus, and since my family life was so chaotic, the stress of everything happening at home on top of taking on a huge course load made me lose my academic scholarship, and the thought of taking out student loans to be a gigging musician seemed like a guaranteed way to never escape poverty. I didn’t know what to do. So I did nothing. The deadline passed, and I fell into a deep depression that took years to get out of.

I had to start working in various blue collar environments until I had enough money to move out with my partner, who turned out to be really shitty once we started living together so then I had to find a place by myself, then I went back to a technical college to get some IT certs, and eventually stumbled into my first “big boy” job doing IT for a large warehouse. Since then, I’ve doubled my salary by hopping between a few different tech jobs, and I even get to play in a local symphony with the same instrument that was given to me for school.

It took about 5 years of wafting around after dropping out of college, and my mental health was in the shitter for most of that, but going through that stress made me the person I am today, and for the first time in my life, I kind of like who I am. With that said, I didn’t have the time to enjoy life with how much I was working and am trying to make up for lost time now. But it’s so much easier to do that now that I have disposable income and a comfortable place to sleep every night.

TL;DR Your early 20s suck and there’s going to be a lot of stress – thats unavoidable unless you’re a nepo baby. Just roll with it and don’t forget to have fun every now and then. You’ll figure it out.