I feel like once we reach adolescence, growing up involves surviving the minefield of adult questions…do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend yet? How are your grades? What did you get on the SAT’s? Where are you applying for college? By the time I was 17, I felt like I had to arrive at every adult get-together with a post-it on my forehead with my test scores, grades, relationship status, and where I was applying to school. I’m not a teenager anymore, but I am currently confronting one of biggest questions of early adulthood: what are you doing now that you’ve graduated college?

This question is most neatly answered when there is a definite “plan,” like grad school or a job immediately following. But not everyone has a ready-made answer. And not everyone realizes the value in taking time off from a pre-set pathway. Most people don’t see the value in slowing down a little after graduation. I realize that some people may need to get a job immediately for financial reasons, but aside from this and having a burning desire to work or get more schooling, the most valuable thing to do is slow down.

After a lifetime of schooling, graduation is the first time that we can finally be our own teachers, and become students of whatever we want, for whatever reasons we want. It’s a time of self-enrichment and self-reflection. A time to start asking yourself some questions, like “what have I always wanted to do, but never had the time?” Or, “how do I feel being completely in charge of my days, with no one telling me what projects I have to do…does it make me nervous? Excited?” And even, “if I could be paid to do anything I wanted, what would it be? How can I aim at making that my job?”

I myself have become a student of several new things, some planned and some unplanned. I am taking a drawing class and guitar lessons, but am learning a lot more than art and music. I am learning some very important lessons that I was never taught in school: how to relax, and how to accept my mistakes and realize that most of the time, mistakes are a myth. In both drawing and guitar, the one thing my teachers keep telling me is “relax, loosen up more.” My guitar teacher even writes it down in my notebook along with my song assignments—that’s how bad I am at relaxing. I am a classic perfectionist and overachiever, which is a very bad combination for adopting relaxation into my life. As a kid, I was subconsciously taught that productivity and achievement came from plowing through non-stop until I reached my goal. I have always treated weekends the same way I treat weekdays: by over-planning activities, and expecting to keep up my fast-paced lifestyle. I have never been good at relaxing, because I quickly get antsy and anxious, even guilty, wondering what I should be doing instead of relaxing.

As soon as I graduated, everything changed. Suddenly, when I found myself relaxing with a book or in front of the TV, I couldn’t think of what I was “supposed” to be doing…there was nothing! There are no homework assignments or papers that I’m supposed to be doing. Only the projects that I want to do. As it turns out, this whole relaxing thing is pretty nice. And it’s something that I need to understand if I don’t want to burn out in my future schooling or career endeavors. I didn’t know how unbalanced I was until I realized that relaxing was difficult for me.

The other thing that I’m learning is that’s it’s OK to make mistakes. The fact that I don’t know this is devastating, because every kid should learn this first and foremost. I’ve always felt uncomfortable learning something new because I am afraid to make mistakes, especially in front of someone. Guitar and drawing are really helping with this. In music and especially in art, mistakes are absolutely necessary. Moreover, in art, there really is no such thing as a mistake, because there really isn’t a control against which you are compared (or at least there shouldn’t be, and we need to avoid creating this in our own heads). The point of music and art is to become better with time, to best yourself, and realize that creativity is about not following the rules perfectly and definitely not about what other people are doing.

When people ask me what I’m doing with my time since I graduated, I say that I’m studying music and art. But what they don’t know unless they really care to probe deeper is that I am learning a tremendous amount about myself that being in school never helped me learn. Whether or not you are as young as I, or entrenched in an unrewarding job, or a parent, or a homebody, or a successful professional, or anything, really, there is nothing more valuable than taking time for you on your own terms. There is always more to learn.