COTE
VOLINO-GAP-YEAR
11/2/2025
The Accidental Gap Year: How Anna Volino Grew Up Too Fast—and Learned to Slow Down
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — When Anna Volino’s family packed up their life in Charleston to move to Jacksonville, she didn’t go. It was 2020, the middle of the pandemic, and Anna—just eighteen—made a choice that would shape her twenties in ways she didn’t see coming.
Her parents thought she’d follow. Her little brother Rocco, protective and blunt, didn’t understand why she wanted to stay behind. But Anna had roots in Charleston—friends, routines, a sense of ownership over her life. “It wasn’t rebellion,” she says. “I just didn’t want to start over somewhere new.”
So, while her family drove south, Anna stayed.
At first, it felt exciting—her first apartment, her best friend Hannah as a roommate, a little bit of freedom at last. Hannah was older, steadier, and usually covered rent when Anna couldn’t. Their place had tall ceilings, mismatched furniture, and a tortoise named Zion who often vanished under the couch. “We’d lose him for hours,” Anna laughs. “It was gross sometimes, but it was ours.”
Anna worked constantly that year. At a restaurant from Thursday to Monday. At a Montessori daycare during the week. Babysitting in the gaps between. She made nearly $70,000 by the end of it—an impressive number for someone who hadn’t started college yet—but it came at a cost.
“I was exhausted,” she admits. “I thought working all the time meant I was doing the right thing. But I was just… burnt out.”
Her days revolved around schedules, car payments, and the endless cycle of making and spending money. At the daycare, she cared for kids between 14 weeks and three years old, often eating the same snacks they did—Sunny D, Rice Krispy treats, Goldfish crackers—half out of convenience, half because it made her feel like one of them. “I ate like a child,” she jokes, “because I was surrounded by them all day.”
Her dad back in Jacksonville didn’t see the gap year as a great adventure. When Anna hesitated about college, he told her flatly, “Stop being an idiot.” She laughs when she repeats it now—not out of bitterness, but recognition. He was scared she’d stall out.
Eventually, she realized he might have been right.
So, she packed up her life again and headed to Tampa, enrolling at Hillsborough Community College. There, an English professor noticed her sharp writing and curiosity and told her she’d thrive at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. That moment, small as it seemed, became her push toward journalism.
Now 22, Anna is a senior majoring in Digital Communication and Multimedia Journalism at USFSP. She’s traded daycare shifts for digital ones—first managing social media for a boating company and an engineering firm, and now working as a VIP concierge for M.Bird, a rooftop bar and restaurant in downtown Tampa. The job blends her communication skills with her love for people, and it’s one of the first roles that doesn’t drain her.
“I have balance now,” she says simply. “I used to work seven days a week. Now, I make time to actually live.”
She’s learned to slow down—to go to the beach, to rest without guilt, to reconnect with her family. Rocco, now seventeen, still calls occasionally. They send each other funny reels on Instagram. Her parents, once worried about her staying behind, have come to see how that year shaped her.
When Anna looks back on her accidental gap year, she doesn’t regret it. It was messy, hard, and often lonely, but it taught her the difference between growing up fast and growing up fully.
“That year made me realize I didn’t have to have everything figured out,” she says. “I just had to keep moving forward.”
Now, with graduation on the horizon, she carries that lesson into everything she does. Her life may have started off one year “late,” but in reality, it just started honestly—on her own terms.
If she could change anything about that Charleston chapter, it would only be this: “I should’ve worked less,” she says. “Lived more.”
