The Voices Project: Lindsay Foreman-Murray on the space and time to appreciate what life has to offer

Thinking about starting this piece, I am torn between two equally representative moments from my Gap Year: the first, waking up in a hostel in Ireland, surrounded by sleeping strangers who had become my new best friends in the last 24 hours, listening to the sounds of the sheep outside the windows, the snores of the other people in my bunk room, and the happy clank of other residents making breakfast in the old stone kitchen next door. This moment is romantic in my memory, with the chill of the morning air fresh on my face and the thrill of the possibility of adventure, so new at the time. Travelling, making my life up as I go along, changing locations whenever I please, and making lasting friends along the way has become a lifestyle for me since that year, the overarching theme of my life, but it was all new to me at age 18, fresh out of high school.

In many ways, my Gap Year showed me how big the world is, how many possibilities it contains, and how much what I do depends on me and no one else.

The second memory, just as pertinent, is waking up to an alarm at 3:30am in December in Massachusetts, at my parents’ house, dragging myself out of bed and into the dark house and the dark car and the dark night to get to my bakery job by 4am. My Gap Year was cyclical; I worked and saved, then spent my money on adventures, then worked and saved. I hadn’t done a lot of financial planning for my year, and I’d burned through the money I’d made over the summer in just a few months of wandering around Europe. Being broke while backpacking led to its own kind of adventures; sleeping under bridges in Ireland, sneaking onto trains in Scandinavia, and finally making a desperate push without money for food to get back to London and get on a plane home.

In the process, I had to stop going to museums and taking site tours, and started spending a lot of my travel time trying to find cheap food or a place to stay. Back home, work was intense; I’d taken on two full-time jobs and was pulling insane hours trying to get the funding together to get back out into the world. Living at home was lonely, boring, and exhausting, and taught me the second big lesson of that year; to be careful in my planning, to consider the implications of my choices, to weigh my short-term need for adventure against my long-term need for sustainability.

This lesson balanced the first; the world is huge and full of possibility, but you have to plan carefully to get to do everything you want to.

When I did leave home again, I did it sensibly; I had saved quite a bit of money, I found a job in New Zealand that paid ok, and when I got there I found the most affordable ways to see the country. I sold myself as a travel writer and got sent on assignments to wineries and volcanoes. I bought an old car with some friends and travelled with them on weekends and vacations, eating homemade sandwiches and sleeping in hostels or camping. In the course of my time there, New Zealand became home, and had I not deferred a college acceptance I promised my parents I would come back for I would have stayed forever.

When I decided to take a year off before college…

I would have told you I was doing it because I’d been in school my whole life and wanted to try something different, or that I wasn’t sure college was right for me, or because I was young and needed to see some things before I settled back down for four years. These things were all true, and could be boiled down to the idea that I wasn’t ready for college, a fact that was truer than I knew. When I went back to school, I valued the protected space to learn, the structure, and the readily available food and shelter in ways I never could have without my year off. I also sought paid work immediately, knowing my wanderlust was not sated, and found spontaneity, adventure, new people, and opportunities for travel everywhere in my settled life.

I went into my Gap Year excited to be in charge of my own life for a while, to make my own decisions and to follow instincts and interests wherever they might lead me. I wanted adventure, and I got it, but more than that I got to know myself and what I care about most. My Gap Year gave me organizing principles for my life, taught me who I am and what I value, and allowed me the space and time to appreciate what the rest of my life had to offer.