Taking a Gap Year

Everyone needs a good gap 🍃

Three weeks before my 21^st birthday, I packed my clothes and clock radio into my maroon Volvo and moved across the country to Perth, Western Australia.

I was recruited to play football for a team over there, but the real reason I went was that I’d finished university (Marketing and Economics), meaning I had an excuse to bugger off.  I didn’t get many kicks but I did catch a few waves. Drank plenty of beers too. I also spent a lot of it thinking about what was next.

Exactly one year after I set off, I thought I had the answer, so I moved home to get a “real” job. Time to put that degree to use, I figured. Twenty years on, I look back and think how memorable my first gap year was. I feel even more fondly about the two that followed.

A decade later, feeling stuck and working a job that wasn’t right for me, I was desperate for something different. But due to my upbringing, quitting a “decent job” without a plan wasn’t only frowned upon, it was a downright failure of character… so I hung in there. It was six years until I found a way out that would spare my blushes – becoming a high school teacher.

I’d needed the excuse of graduating to get me to take my first gap year, and this time returning to study afforded me the same opportunity. I was thirty and floundering. My friends were marrying, buying houses and planning their families, but for me, going back to university was my big life decision. I can’t take all the credit for making it though.

What really gave me the push I needed was that the qualification required, a Diploma of Education, was changing. I had long felt a calling to become a teacher, but I also had dreams of making the big bucks. Those two things rarely go together. The opportunity to do the course in one year rather than two, which would be the case the following year, meant it was now or never, so I took the leap.

While this “gap year” was far from the sunning myself on a beach, binge drinking, and Contiki bus riding cliched version we have come to expect of them, having 14 contact hours of classes that I enjoyed felt like a lightening of my load.

Thanks to a combination of savings, government assistance, and a weekly cash filled envelope from playing country football, I was able to pay the bills. Thank goodness I could, because this was the single most important year of my life. Then, like clockwork, ten years later I had my third gap year (that was actually eight months). This time the backdrop was different again.

At 37, having suffered burnout, I took a few days off work before soldiering on. I was stressed, jittery, couldn’t sleep and not at all myself. I should’ve resigned there and then… but remember how I don’t know how to quit. Eighteen months later, I finally did. It took cultivating another excuse as to why though (because for whatever reason my mental and physical disintegration wasn’t enough). My way out was to finally write the screenplay I’d been stopping and starting for years.

I gave myself two to three months to work on the script. But after I’d completed it, I still wasn’t ready to return to the workforce. Not even close. By the time I was, about six months into my hiatus, the job market had changed, as had my ever-growing checklist of things I wanted from a vocation. This meant it took me a couple more months to find something that suited. It all worked out though.

I wish I more people knew that gap years are an option. And I really wish everyone could experience how incredibly reenergising and rejuvenating they are.

It doesn’t have to be a full twelve months, quitting a job, a career change, or moving somewhere far far away. Maybe it’s finally going back to study, finding a new hobby, or taking a job in a book store two days a week while you think about what you really want to do next.

I wish I knew at twenty that I could take a gap year at any age and stage of life. I’m already looking forward to my next. It’s only about nine years away.

ZP / NpG

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