A reflection at the start of the fourth quarter

This post is a bit personal, but I think it will help anyone who’s thinking about a gap year of their own.

***

Holly Bull, the president of a company that organizes gap-year programs abroad, said in the New York Times Article on gap years I recently posted that “More than an alternative to burnout, a rugged gap year spent working on a sustainable farm in Costa Rica can provide a means to building self-confidence in students who might otherwise “get munched up by academic process.’”

I expected my gap year to give me this confidence, the sort of confidence that can’t be hurt by the ups and downs of collegiate jostling. And I expected this fortified confidence to rest on the solid foundation of a crowning victory from the gap year.

I didn’t have a clear idea what form this victory would take. Generously, you could say I was intellectually flexible about it. Perhaps it would take the form of hitchhiking across Spain, or Europe. Perhaps I would learn some incredible new skill, like break-dancing, and I would return to the United States to spend the summer entertaining in various nightclubs. Perhaps I would find some whacky and glorious job like writing for the National Geographic for a piece they were doing on a tribe in Morocco.

The gap year gave me a constant source of temporary self-esteem. Leaving the Harvard-Westlake crowd and entering a truer-to-life slice of society almost always put me at the top of any group in terms of quickness, knowledge about history and current events, and, to my surprise, confidence and gregariousness. But that kind of ego boost will mostly go away when I reenter places where everyone’s a big shot, as I will do in September.

So what about the big achievement?

Well, I plan on doing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which is a bit of an adventure. It’s true, I’ll have a path to follow, so it’s a bit different than hitchhiking through a country. I rode my skateboard as transportation when I wasn’t taking the metro, so I’ve learned how to ride passably after not really being able to ride at all. True, that’s not going to get me any glorious summer gigs. I worked as an English teacher of small classes, and I found I was pretty good at it, developing a solid, personal relationship with every one of my students, getting along wonderfully with almost every one of them, and even becoming friends outside of class with a few. True, that’s not National Geographic in Africa.

I am proud of those accomplishments, though, especially the last one. I compare myself to some break-dancing hitch-hiking National Geographic-writing gap-year superhero, but fuck it, if someone can build confidence on a farm in Costa Rica than I’m going to let myself acknowledge the confidence gained by teaching English in Spain.

***

But even if I didn’t have these “confidence-building” activities, I would consider the gap year worth it for three lessons I’ve learned, all of which required time off from school.

During the school year, my father sent me an important email talking about his competitive drive, how he had let it take control of him for the first part of his life and how he had mostly mastered and restrained it for the second. It planted the seeds of an idea that needed some time off to flower. In England, around people with whom I felt comfortable being myself, I saw my competitiveness when we played games like Scrabble together. Then, in Spain, playing basketball with my host father against two neighborhood kids, I took over and won the game Kobe-style, but I came home with a blister that had blown up so badly that the next day my host mother had to help me stick a needle through it. Looking at these occasions, and even more so, looking back at occasions from before the gap year, I saw for the first time: I am competitive.

The second lesson I learned was that my competitiveness could be dangerous. This lesson had even less than the first one to do with events going on in the gap year; it came from events from before the gap year being replayed in my head now that I had time to ponder. In school, one doesn’t have as much time to ponder. We’re faced with high stakes decisions and deadlines daily. Now, I could contemplate, and I realized that my competitiveness had led to my most stressful and my saddest moments, and, after more contemplation, that it had also led to my greatest successes. I became conscious that my competitiveness was both valuable and dangerous. I saw I would need to watch it carefully, in college and forward.

The third lesson was the realization that college is for finding out what’s fun and doing it. I had gone through high school with this purpose in mind, but also with the idea of excelling. To me, excelling was rising above others. I didn’t need others to notice – I solely needed to know for myself that I had “excelled” – but it was still a dangerous if not downright unhealthy aim. In college, I decided, I would try to find out what gave me joy, and I would do it. I would allow myself to be competitive with myself to do the best job I could do, but I would avoid the comparisons to others. I saw that this was the route I needed to take.

These three lessons needed the time off. For them alone, the gap year would have been worth it.

***

And, beyond these three lessons, I have learned more broadly and deeply about myself.

I have learned that, if I feel I have to, I can hold a room. I have been living outside of my comfort zone, both in terms of living within a slightly different etiquette and being with totally new people, not even part of some shared program. This newness forced me to reach back and grab all the sociability I could muster. I drew on Scene Monkeys, sometimes, but more often I drew on a calm, centered personality I hardly knew I possessed.

I have learned about classical liberal economics! With a lot of free time when I was in Santander, I read Free to Choose, a “personal statement” by Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife. It has changed my life. I imagine my personal views differ widely from those of Friedman’s followers, but they have nonetheless been significantly influenced by his ideas, ideas I hadn’t been able to explore before.

I have learned to embrace my self-doubt. I mean self-doubt in an intellectual sense – not the self-doubt that shackles someone to small ideas and small ambitions, not the self-doubt that keeps someone from dreaming big – I mean the self-doubt that makes someone constantly question the arguments he or she puts forth. I used to resent my self-doubt, feeling that if I could bull-rush ahead, my arguing style would be stronger. I feel the opposite now: That the self-doubt makes me a better debater by leading me to consider arguments against my ideas even before others present those arguments to me; that it makes me a better thinker by forcing me to embrace nuance; and that it makes me a better listener by making me aware that I will never be able to connect the dots alone. I’ve interacted with so many different people on this gap year, from such a variety of cultures. It has become clear to me that a person’s eloquence and concision, his or her appreciation of complexity, and his or her flexibility of mind all rest and fall on that person’s ability to doubt him or herself. Crude anecdotal evidence for this connection comes from the American who insults the Spanish culture as superficial, or dirty, or wrapped up in partying, and from the Brazilian who charges that Americans don’t know anything about the world beyond their 50 states. Each should literally think twice.

Before I took the gap year, though, I didn’t know I’d learn the lessons I’ve learned or gain the insights about myself that I’ve gained. So why did I do it? At first, I wasn’t sure, and even after I had started I wasn’t really sure. I gave two chief reasons: I said I wanted to learn Spanish, and I said I wanted an adventure. Both were true and good reasons, but they didn’t make up the whole picture.

Years back, the daughter of my Mom’s best friend visited Los Angeles. (This year, when I visited London, we became close friends.) In Los Angeles, she described the idea of a gap year, which she said was very popular in England. I was enchanted, and I kept the idea in the back of my mind all through high school.

Halfway through senior year, I floored my parents by telling them I intended to take the next year off. My Mom was against the idea but not strident. My Dad was open. At Stanford’s admit weekend, I spoke to a dean who dealt with gap years. I asked him whether I could inform Stanford of my decision to defer at the end of July. He said that the late date would be okay. Two of my best friends and I were going on a Eurotrip in July, and my plan was to see whether I liked Europe then. If I did, I’d pull the trigger on the gap year.

As I had expected, I did like Europe, and I pulled the trigger. I sent a letter to Stanford explaining what I would be doing and why I was taking the year off. My four reasons, in highly formal language that hid the reality that I didn’t really know why I was doing what I was doing, were to learn Spanish (“a very important skill in an increasingly globalized society”), to gain teaching skills, to see the world, and to go on an adventure.

I have gotten all four of those things out of the gap year, but there were other important reasons too. Someone who wants to go through college trying to beat others is someone who needs to take a gap year. I didn’t have that insight, though, nor did I even know that I was dangerously competitive. But there was some instinct that pointed me in the right direction, something that murmured, “A pause would be a good idea” even as logic screamed that I had not planned nor thought the gap year through.

I must stress to anyone considering a gap year the importance of this point. If you’re already considering it, the likelihood is that something instinctual is murmuring that a pause would be a good idea. Maybe there’s a lesson you need to learn. Maybe there’s an insight you need to gain. Maybe there’s something else entirely. For some reason, a pause would be a good idea.