Minding the gap: lessons learned during a year off

I did not go to school last year. For the first time since toddlerhood, I woke up on September 1st and did not pack up my new Jansport full of No. 2 pencils and lined paper, and go to class. I did not reconnect with familiar friends, nor was I forced to play icebreakers with hordes of equally confused new students. Instead I cooked breakfast in my first apartment, walked to the Museum School of Fine Arts, and unloaded a spectrum of oil paints and varied sizes of pre-stretched canvas. I hoped that I would prove them all wrong—my doubting friends and cynical skeptical superiors—and come away from my year off with an increased knowledge of the world and a better understanding of myself. But as I looked around the room of much older art students, I began to fear that I had made a terrible mistake, sealing my fate on the road to inevitable failure.
Why was I in this art class to begin with, far removed from the typically awkward college-orientation programs, where my former classmates were all happily situated? Why would I give up a good game of human knot or 20 Questions to live in a small apartment in Boston and travel around with just a huge backpack? The answer to these (completely reasonable) questions is that I took  a gap year.

Now, I know the stigma that goes along with the term “gap year.” You may envision me as some over-privileged Gossip Girl wannabe on Daddy’s yacht, “recovering” from a stressful senior year of high school, doling out twenties to hot men waving large palm fronds. Let me tell you, there were no yachts involved, and the majority of twenties I dispensed at the hardware store, where I bought traps to murder the mice who routinely nibbled holes in just about everything I owned.
My gap year, though far from Blair Waldorf-ish, was not entirely confined to heavy backpacks and peckish rodents. I also did all the cliché, but wonderful, bohemian stuff: strolling along the Charles River in Boston, and later the Seine in Paris, buying baguettes, reading Proust in cafes, and spending hours in one of the many art museums. I also knew that my schedule shouldn’t just be “time off,” but a productive and fulfilling year. For the first six months, I found work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and enrolled in the Continuing Education program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. When I was not working or painting and drawing, I immersed myself in Boston’s cultural scene by visiting museums and attending lectures. I took French classes and planned my spring, an exploration of the artistic Meccas of France and Germany.

A three-month backpacking experience is impossible to encapsulate in one paragraph, but here goes: I found work on a self-sustaining farm in Trets, a small village outside Aix-en-Provence. The farm accepted international volunteers and provided food and housing in exchange for labor. I helped plant and harvest vegetables, rebuild a horse stable, weed the fields, and prepare food for the farm’s restaurant. I was only allowed to speak French on the farm, which, while scary at the beginning, proved a most efficient study of the language. After the farm, I packed my backpack and traveled the country, spending time in Toulouse, Lyon, Nice, and Paris, living on baguettes and visiting art museums. After France, I took the Eurorail to Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, and Hamburg and then spent my last two weeks in Europe at another service project in Marburg, Germany, where I helped to renovate a youth holiday camp and took introductory German classes.
Now that I am in college, my gap year over, my life back to “normal,” I spend a good deal of time fielding questions, many of which seem to stem from the same worry my friends and teachers expressed when I first presented my idea of a gap year. “Why would you do such a thing?” “What do your parents think?”  “Were you nervous?”
Most of those questions are good, valid, and a little scary (the scariest of which came from my next door neighbor, who was under the impression that I was working at the Gap all year). Before my year off, and many times while in its midst, I felt their same worries and could not always come up with an answer that proved to them or to myself that what I was doing was for the best. The key is to not look at it as a “gap” year—the experiences I had, the people I met, and the perspective I gained made it the best (and fullest) year of my life—so far anyways.