What I Accomplished in My Gap Year

I took a year off before starting my master’s degree. It was the best decision I could have ever done.

I graduated a year early from college by accident. When the COVID-19 pandemic started in New York City, I had a terrible break-up with someone who was unnecessarily cruel even before that, and was descending deeper into a state of poor mental health. I wasn’t happy at my college and with what I was studying because of the people: I despised having to deal with racist professors and also having to work two jobs to barely make it in New York City. Surrounded by all these wealthy, privileged people was not doing well for my mental health. So I graduated a year early and made the decision to take my time, apply to graduate school during the process.

Well, my year is up. I’ve grown a lot as a human being during this time, so there have been many lessons learned. Other goals, like getting my mental health under control, may have even gotten worse at times. But all in all, I know I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I think I’m one hundred steps closer to where I may want to be in the future. This is what I learned and did during my time off.

I realized can take my time with my goals.

I think a lot of people fall into the trap that they need to have a checklist of what needs to be done by the time they’re thirty years old. At twenty-one, I stopped actively checking social media during this gap year and avoided writer’s Twitter. I felt like I wasn’t doing enough compared to some sixteen year old on the other side of the country, but then I started working on the On Her Shoulders database at New Perspectives Theatre Company. I made an entire database of female playwrights and wrote bios, created the skeleton of the tech behind it, and do marketing. But a lot of the female playwrights I read about weren’t immediately successful in their youth. And most people are not. Nowadays the average age to success is about 29, which makes me feel somewhat better, but I realized some of the world’s most coveted writers and artists were still dreamers when they were twenty-nine too.

I started my own freelancing business.

In 2020, I technically laid down the roots for this when I started working at the theatre. Realizing the gaps I held in my knowledge, I started taking classes on SEO, digital marketing, and building an entire skillset for being able to position myself as a creative business owner. I set my plan to action when I finally landed a job at MovieWeb as a contract writer, which enabled me to have the confidence to start putting myself out there more. I started getting more and more clients for my digital marketing services, as well as the fact that I began to get more offers and contacts for potential writing gigs. It all adds up, at the end of the day. I also worked hard on this blog, which grew to points I still cannot even imagine. The future is really bright—I also had the money to buy my first car from this and have enough to pay my first semester of graduate school tuition.

I wrote over 200 new pieces.

I may not have published much in the past year creatively, but combined with my journalism work, I’ve been writing constantly all the time. In the book Outliers, the author details that an individual who was shown to be more quote-on-quote more successful spent over 10,000 hours practicing their specialty. I’ve been writing for about eight years now, so I imagine by this point I’ve gotten in the three thousand mark at the very least. Focusing more on craft than publication, I’ve honed on a different voice that I’ve used in the past and feel that some of my best work has been written during this period. Maybe someone will publish them eventually, but right now I’m simply happy being a writer existing within this space of creativity and art.

I traveled a lot to places new and old.

This year, I went to Hawaii with my family. I started consistently going back to New York and attended Broadway shows again for the first time since college. I began to relearn my passion for history, culture, theatre, and the arts through these day trips to Washington D.C. or a museum somewhere on Oahu. Part of the reason I wanted to pursue graduate school was to have the opportunity to eventually be funded for things I’m passionate about, as well as having the opportunity to become a teacher to help those, who like me, did not come from backgrounds where they saw the world actively. I also ended up documenting these experiences on my blog, cementing their memory as long as the Internet exists.

I got a lot better at cooking, and became more passionate about food history.

I will admit, I wasn’t a very good cook before this year. I started out desperately following recipes and didn’t have a creative ounce within me, but after constantly checking out cookbooks and food science books at my local library, I’ve become a lot better at making my own recipes. I almost landed a job at one of my favorite food publications (spoiler: I did not get it but got to meet one of my idols), which was a testament to how far I’ve grown during the past year. One of my goals was to introduce my family to more foods from other cultures, so I’ve been making a lot of Northern Indian, Korean, Ethiopian, and Moroccan food during the past year. I want to learn more about Latin American food cultures, so that’s what I’ve got my eyes on next.

Finally, I became more in tune with who I was and what I wanted.

During this year, I didn’t have a car nor my license. That meant I spent a lot of time at home, working in my garden, or simply staring out the window at the birds chirping on our dogwood tree’s branches. I kind of started doing this during COVID, but I attended lectures, workshops, all free, in order to try my hand at something I’d never been exposed to before. That’s kind of how I learned how to do marketing in the first place, through a bunch of free opportunities that spiraled into paid ones that I got scholarships for, and look. how that turned out. Because I had this time to do a lot of things, whether it was taking classes, volunteering, or simply interviewing someone for my new freelance jobs, I think I learned a little bit more about the world and the people living in it despite never actually leaving my house.