How did time fly by so quickly? One minute, I had a whole, long year stretching out ahead of me; next minute, I only have a week left before I move to university.
Well, maybe not quite as extreme as this, but you get the gist. The thing is, though, having a gap year has been a heck of a lot harder than I had ever imagined it to be. I feel as if I’ve both tackled everything and nothing; I’ve developed and I’ve regressed; I’ve changed and I’ve stagnated. However, whenever people ask me what exactly I have done over this past year (which is the second-most popular conversation starter after “What are you doing at university?”) my mind goes blank, I perhaps manage to list a few things on the spot and, yet, when I’m back home a few hours later I can’t help but ask myself “What have I actually done with myself?”. So, here’s my answer.
I decided to conduct a self-interview of my gap year. Maybe it will prove useful for others pondering taking a year out of education. Maybe it will just be interesting to read. Maybe it will be neither.
What made you take a gap year?
I took a gap year with my health in mind above all else. I don’t think that the me of a year ago could have coped with leaving home and living by myself this time last September. (And don’t try telling me I could have just lived at home! Even if my university had been close enough for that, I’ve always wanted to have the entire university experience, including the being independent and living with new people part.)
As an individual who felt like I’d lost a year of my life to awful health: two blood tests a week, journeys to and from hospital, losing consciousness a few times a week or else taking days off at a time to sit at home either feeling or being sick - yes, life was such fun – I felt so emotionally and physically unprepared for university.
I decided a gap year was the answer. In this way, I could get back a year of my life that had been taken from me. I could try my hand at being independent, but not to the extent of leaving home.
How did people react?
When I told my parents about my year out, I don’t think they were particularly surprised or remotely disappointed. Primarily because they’ve never been the type to try and dictate what I should do with my life. Secondly, because they knew I’d had a rather rough couple of years beforehand health-wise.
Not everyone was so positive about the whole idea. I’ve had people tell me “Oh, you’ll never want to go back to education after you’ve had a year without studying.” Or, “If I were you, I’d just go and get it over with.” What I hate with a passion is when people try and tell you how you’re going to think and feel. It makes me want to do exactly what they advise I shouldn’t. The fact of the matter is, I now feel one hundred percent certain that I want a university degree, as opposed to how terrified and unprepared I felt a year ago (admittedly, I still feel unprepared and a little terrified, but in a kind of I-know-this-is-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life-even-though-it-scares-me way). Instead, this year, I’m fed up of not learning. Yes, you heard me correctly. I miss my college lessons greatly. I even slightly miss writing essays. But here I am straying onto the next question.
What has been the hardest part of your gap year?
For me, by far the hardest part of having a gap year has been the lack of a consistent routine. You don’t realise how much of your life is spent following a routine or a timetable until you are left with an abundance of spare time on your hands. When you’ve spent what feels like your whole life being in school or college, a whole day stretching ahead of you with nothing to fill it feels both like an eternity, and like nothing at all.
I love routine. I loved having a timetable of lessons and study periods at college. In the absence of these, I have really struggled. My mum predicted I would find this new form of independence difficult, and goodness me, she was more than right.
Another difficult part has been studying and working by myself. I’ve heard that university is a lot about independent study, but I also imagine it can’t be as independent as my work has been this year. I have had piano lessons, yes, but even with these they’re only an hour a week and then the rest is up to me. Anything else additionally done in my spare time has been my own choice, such as writing my play. I’ve not had anybody set me any kind of assignment or project for well over a year, and I really do miss that.
What have you achieved during this year?
For a lot of people, the phrase “gap year” is synonymous with “travelling”. For me, although I did travel to Catalonia by myself – something I never thought I could have achieved a few years ago – journeying to places unknown was never the focus of my year out of education.
I wanted a job above all else, and lots of money. Looking back, I had pretty unrealistic expectations, especially considering the fact that I’ve actually made a slight loss in terms of money rather than any kind of gain. Oops.
In my defence, job hunting proved immeasurably harder than I had ever imagined. It’s the same old story: employees want someone with experience. But to get experience, you need to be employed. My first job interview was awful. I remember I was so nervous that I unintentionally lied about where I was going on holiday (is it just me that accidentally lies when majorly stressed?) and then had to go along with a conversation about how hot it would be in the place I was most certainly not jetting off to. Of course, I don’t think that was the reason I didn’t get the job. Probably the fact that I was a jittery bag of nerves was the main factor.
I did eventually get a job offer at a lovely café in the centre of Wakefield, Mocca Moocho’s. Unfortunately, after my first work trial, my hands had not had such a great time as the rest of me. I realised that it would be impossible for me to work with food due to my eczema, and so the long and arduous job hunt continued.
I eventually secured my first part-time job at The Works. I stayed only for a few weeks as the work was mind-numbingly dull and one member of staff kept commenting on how quiet I was and that I needed to “loosen up”. In hindsight, he wasn’t being mean; I just don’t think he knew how to handle someone who’s never had a great talent for small talk. Also, his remarks were literally nothing compared to how I would be treated at my second place of work.
I like to think of piano teaching as my first “proper” job, even though I only had one pupil. Passed onto me from a retired piano teacher, she was a pre-grade 1 player who I took through grade 1 ABRSM. Initially, I felt very underqualified to teach her. I remember I used to worry so much before she came, but after a month or so I stopped having to plan every minute of her lesson and began to relax into things. In turn, she began to open up to me and we had lovely chats about everything from her day at school, to which coloured post-it notes we each preferred (of course, this was only two minutes of the lesson – I did do a lot of teaching too!). I came to realise why my own piano teacher had gone into her job. It was so satisfying watching her technique improve and know that this was my own doing!
In addition to this, I decided to join a writer’s group in Leeds, and returned to a piano playing meetup group that I had joined around February. When at college, the last thing I wanted to do was trek to Leeds on my weekends, so the gap year certainly gave me the opportunity to travel more.
Feeling incredibly nervous and apprehensive, I decided to give the writer’s group a try. And goodness me, I am so glad that I did. All along, I had worried that I would feel like such a child among adults, who would all be much more established in writing than me. My worries disappeared immediately as I was welcomed into the group. After just one day there, I felt a part of the conversations and already excited for when the next session would be. I think I’ve been to every single Saturday session since, and I always come away feeling immensely satisfied socially and writing-wise.
My second place of work came to me after a group job interview. I won’t write the name of the company here, but I think most people know it already anyway. Initially, I thought it would be great fun working among stationery and beautiful products in a lovely, spacious shop, probably making lots of friends and gaining confidence over the weeks. And, initially, it was alright. This just didn’t last for very long.
I have never been spoken to and treated in the way I was at this retail store. It soon became clear that the most important focus of the company was to flog loyalty cards: even when customers had said “no”, I was scolded if I didn’t continue to give them the whole spiel about the many advantages of the card. In the words of the deputy manager “If they say no, they’re just about to change their mind.”
Great logic.
I was once instructed to blatantly lie to customers. For example, I was told to assure them that we only required an email address for a loyalty card, so that by the time I was asking them for all their personal details and home address, it would be too late to back out. This did not go down too well for one woman, who became extremely angry when I asked her “Can I take your address please?” after telling her I only needed her email. I could hardly tell her the deputy manager had instructed me to lie.
The whole work ethic of that shop is messed up. Nobody cares about anything other than how many loyalty cards you have flogged that day. If you got less than six or seven an hour, you became a terrible employee. More, and you were a star. Your average score was calculated every hour and you would receive a disgusted look and a scolding remark from the deputy manager if you got a bad one.
I never dared to tell them about my disability and was not allowed water at hand, so I left work severely dehydrated after every shift. I never got a break either.
This was not the worst part, believe me. My breaking point came when the deputy manager shouted at me in front of a long line of customers. After a four-hour shift listening to the passive-aggressive muttering of the staff on either side of me, which consisted of phrases including you’re going too slowly and holding up the whole queue and you do realise that you’re slowing down the whole shop (I was trying my very best to speed up typing in people’s addresses and personal information, but this is remarkably difficult when your hands are shaking), I then became the focus of the second-in-command.
“DON’T EVER LET ME SEE YOU DO THAT EVER AGAIN,” she yelled, aggressively tugging open my till which was overcrowded with twenty-pound notes; I had been trying my hardest to keep up with the impossible pace of work and hadn’t had a spare moment to put them into the counterfeit checker. I felt utterly humiliated and useless. From that day, work lost any of its remaining appeal.
I left that shift with tears streaming down my face, looking like so much of an emotional wreck that a postwoman stopped me mid-walk and asked if I needed to seek help.
Quitting work at this shop left me with a very sour taste in my mouth and a desire to never work in retail again.
On a more positive note, I have done quite a few things since leaving the company above. I continued with my piano teaching and began working voluntarily in the languages department at my old high school. My confidence felt at rock bottom in January of this year, and it has taken quite a while to build it back up again.
The teachers were so kind and appreciative of my help at Kettlethorpe that I was reminded there are nice people still out there. I volunteered for quite a few months, taking out students in small groups to speak Spanish with them. Some, of course, were more enthusiastic than others. I had some lovely conversations with bright and willing pupils, plus enjoyed helping those who were eager to learn. After a while though, I grew tired of having the students in some classes collectively groan when it was “speaking time with Becky” again. I decided it was time to work on actively improving my own Spanish, rather than having basic conversations about where pupils liked to go on holiday, especially when they didn’t even appreciate me being there.
Joining Leeds language exchange was fantastic. It was so exhilarating to be challenged in my Spanish speaking once again, and to chat with people who were all interested in improving either their English or Spanish.
Other things that I have done over the course of this gap year include: learning how to touch type (yup, I’m doing it now), returning to my long-missed drama group Yew Tree Youth Theatre, holding two piano concerts in aid of a very personal charity (The Pituitary Foundation), teaching music theory as well as piano, achieving my Grade 8 ABRSM piano, getting my pupil her Grade 1 ABRSM piano (she was awarded a merit!) and writing a play which was performed by a dedicated group of YTYT individuals.
Yes, my play was a definite highlight of the year. Initially, I thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew, having never actually written a script before, but by the end I was feeling very much like a playwright at the start of a long journey of creative writing
The greatest moment for me was when my script was first read aloud by the group of actors. I’d never felt such satisfaction with a piece of writing (and also realised which parts didn’t work so well). Watching it being brought to life over the next few weeks felt very surreal, as if observing a play someone else had written. Spectating it being performed was such a vastly different, and altogether superior, experience to imagining it in my head. I was given this amazing opportunity by Sarah Osborne who runs Yew Tree Youth Theatre. I will be forever grateful to her for treating my play like any other Yew Tree script, and to Helena, Jacob, Lara, Ellie, Maddie, Connor and Jensen for giving up their free time to put it together and perform it live.
Thank you so much! What an opportunity!
What would your advice be to anyone taking a gap year?
With the absence of high school or college to dictate your time, it is important to establish your own timetable. The days where I felt most productive were those where I would get up at 8 o’clock, have breakfast, get ready and then set off on the half-hour walk to my old high school for my volunteering. I felt in control of things, as opposed to the long days where I had nothing planned but to stay at home and try to motivate myself into doing something productive.
Another difficult part of having a year to yourself is the isolation. When I was working at my second job, I saw people so much during the day that I was happy and relieved to be in my own company when I had no shifts. When this came to an end, however, I began to feel the sting of isolation and solitude. In this way, being on a gap year is like the summer holidays when you’re at school or college. You enjoy the break from people at first, but after a while you tire of this and wish to go back to be surrounded by varied company and friends.
What has been the best thing about your gap year?
To teach piano for the first time has been the greatest experience of all. I have been immensely lucky to take on a lovely pupil who was just at the beginning of her piano playing journey, but not a complete beginner, so knew partly what she was doing. She has taught me an immeasurable amount and it is with great sadness that I had to watch her leave. I know I’ll never forget the experience of teaching her piano. And, ultimately, realising that children really can be lovely individuals; there are still some small humans out there with impeccable manners and faultless dedication.
I sit here today writing this as part of the Leeds Writing meetup, which is possibly one of the best groups I’ve ever made the decision to join. Since attending my first session late 2017, I feel as if I have gained great confidence in interacting with groups of people and have really found my place here. As cliché as it may sound, meeting like-minded people is really satisfying and makes you realise that you should continue doing what you love best. I may have had my last session here today, but I know for a fact that I will be back in the holidays. I’ve enjoyed myself far too much to stay away for long.
What is the next step for you?
University!
To the people who told me I’d never want to go onto more education after a gap year… well, you’re wrong! Here I am over a year later, as enthusiastic about my course as ever. I’m studying Creative Writing, not English. Nobody will convince me that the latter is better than the former. They don’t know what’s best suited for me as an individual. Neither will they convince me that it is any “less” of a degree than English literature.
You should do what you want with your life. I certainly will.
Motivational speech over.
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