 Not sure if this is the sub for this, but as the title says, I’m a few years out of high school, and was working a minimum wage restaurant job when covid hit. 

Obviously I was then out of work. I took several months off, and was initially planning on working at a family business that was set to open in a few months. This continually got pushed back as it usually does, and I didn’t look for another job in the meantime for fear I’d only end up working there a few weeks. 

This earnest desire to get back to work eventually turned to gratefulness at been given an “out” to the jobs I’d been working for the last 5 years, and an opportunity to recognize how miserable they made me - mixed with extreme anxiety about the obvious need to get a job, and my inability to explain my two-year resume gap or what I’ve been doing since the pandemic. 

I’ve been living at home, and while I feel having the luxury to take so much time off was good for me mentally,  I have nothing to show for my time. I haven’t done any school, any volunteering, no industry-related courses I could really take as I was working minimum wage. I’ve been doing nothing. 

I need to move out, and move on with my life, but I feel trapped. A return to menial work, if they’d have me, is kind of a waste of my extremely long period of reflection and self-actualization. But I have no qualifications to do anything else. And I don’t know how any job recruiter in any field would want to hire someone like me. 

More years of my life that I just completely wasted, I have no discernible direction to go in, and the amount of uncertainty is just exacerbating my anxiety and my inability to move forward. 
No clue what to do.