The way I see it, I could either graduate at 22 or 23. The former would be standard, while the latter would be potentially life-altering. Assuming I don't do anything really stupid, a gap year is like a call option on a stock: it has limited potential loss (the time I put in, in this case) and unlimited potential gain. The way I see it, why take a gap year? is the wrong question. Better to ask: why go to college right after high school?
The best answer to that question I can think of is that one might get distracted on a gap year and use it for unproductive means. But I know myself well enough to know I wouldn't do that. Regret is one of our strongest motivators, and I use that part of human psychology to my advantage. I would never forgive myself if I took a year off and squandered it. I know that sounds serious, but it's true. Life is short and I want to make the most of it. (I’ll add here that the second best reason I can think of for going straight to college is that one might get socially isolated on a gap year. But with text, FaceTime, Twitter, Discord etc. it’s so easy to stay connected with people. And I tend to make friends wherever I go.)
With that said, here are some things I want to do on a gap year:
Surf, hike, and cook with my aunt and uncle who live in Hawaii. (They’re willing to host me for a month or two.)
Learn Chinese by immersion so as to retain it for the rest of my life and (hopefully) become fluent.
Improve at singing, dancing, and drawing—recently I’ve been discovering the joy that comes from creation with minimal assistance from anything external.
Work out so as to fix muscle imbalances due to years of cross country running.
Travel: experience culture, volunteer, and stay with locals by using Workaway.
Work to pay for my expenditures. (Not sure what this means yet. I think I could make enough money programming, playing/teaching music, or taking pictures, but a part of me really wants to bartend—overseas where I’m legal—so I can make cool drinks while interacting with tons of people.)
Read Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow, Bertrand Russel’s A History of Western Philosophy and Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: books that a brain punctured by due dates and deadlines might not fully appreciate.
Read as many other books as I can from my ever-growing wishlist.
Watch classic movies I haven’t gotten around to seeing yet. (e.g. I still haven’t seen The Breakfast Club.)
Build a personal website to host a blog; write about my experiences.
Study theology so as to more thoroughly examine the foundations of my faith.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a good sample of some of the things I’m interested in doing. Not all of them require being on a gap year, but all would benefit from the extended periods of unstructured time a gap year provides. For example, I can sing, dance, and draw anytime—and I do, right now—but I just have less time as a result of having to sit through class for seven hours a day each weekday.
Beyond all the things I want to do, though, I have deeper motivations. I have better reasons than why not? While I don’t feel the need to go into detail on all of them, I’ll share two of the main ones.
First: Simply put, I love life and want to experience more of it. In a way similar to how Sylvia Plath put it: I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible. A gap year is a wonderful opportunity to broaden my experience of life.
Second: As much as I like to see myself as independent, so much of me is the people around me. So much of me is the culture we live in. And while this isn’t necessarily bad, I could use some space to reflect; unstructured time to live and learn apart from the world I’m embedded in. Ava, a writer whose words I love: If your judgement is always derivative, ripped from your community or your friends, how can you ever trust yourself? How can you ever sit in a dark room and know what you want when all sources of validation are stripped away?
A gap year is a dark room. Time away from external validation and time to reflect. Time to experience life; sing, dance, draw, surf, hike, cook; read, study, learn. Time to cultivate intellectual independence, interact with people from vastly different backgrounds, gain perspective on life. To grow into myself.
To reply you need to sign in.