I never took a gap year. After high school, my friends left for gap years in droves, but I did not. I guess I wasn’t a very independent person, but also I was the kind of person who did what was considered ‘most sensible’, and what was most sensible was go to University and become a doctor. I must have expressed regret at the time because I do remember being told that I could ‘do it later’. Once the hard stuff was over, once all that studying had armed me with a medical degree, I could go and travel and work as a doctor because they were needed the world over, and I was young and there was lots of time, and it was better to just put my head down and do the work and reap the rewards later.
In South Africa, when I was finishing high school in the late nineties, a gap year was generally spent doing unskilled work in the United Kingdom, on what was known as a Working Holiday Visa, available to young adults in countries that were a part of the Commonwealth. I did end up taking a brief working holiday at the end of my second year of med school. A friend and I and flew off to the UK for two months and got a taste of that gap year life. I lived in a filthy house-share with 13 other South Africans in the North East of London and worked a night shift at a warehouse where my job was to hang underwear on a rail for a department store. I met an Australian and fell in love, even though he had a terrible marijuana problem that rendered him incapable of taking me on dates or doing anything that didn’t involve a bong on his bedroom floor. I bought cheap Ryanair tickets to random towns in France and took a day-trip to Oxford. I ate spaghetti and meatballs from a tin, I went to a rave, I wandered Piccadilly Circus at night and looked at the Christmas lights. I loved it: the freedom, the break from the constant pressure and boredom of exams and assignments, the thrill of being virtually invisible in a city that felt like the beating heart of the world. And then I went home, had an untreated major depressive episode, and finished my medical degree.
I didn’t take a gap year after completing my medical degree either, because I had to complete the internship and community service that was compulsory in order to be allowed to practice as a doctor in South Africa. And I didn’t take a gap year after those years, because in those years I began to add things to my life that made the possibility of just flitting off for a year impossible. I started dating the guy I would eventually marry. I picked an abandoned puppy up off of a sidewalk, and that puppy became my dog. We bought a house. We had a baby. I started specialising. These were all good life choices, and have stood me in good stead in the long run, but they left me somewhat geographically committed. Specialising, in particular, kept us put. You can ask friends to look after your dog for a year or two. You can rent out your house. You can, theoretically, take your husband and your children anywhere you go in the world. But try shrugging off a 6-plus year long commitment to specialisation? Look, like anything, if you want it enough, it can be done. You can quit. You can ask for the break and hope your job is still there for you when you get back, but it probably won’t be. Soon after med school I wrote the exam that would grant me access to a specialist training program, and I often feel that when I registered for that exam, I opened a door and started walking the path that would define the next decade of my life. But once we got to its end, my husband and I told each other, we’ll take a break. We’ll take that gap year.
If you are a doctor who wants to do something different for a spell, there are options. You can do something extreme, like go to Antarctica for a year, or volunteer as part of the teams that provide medical care to isolated communities in the Himalayas. You can take a job on a cruise liner, which pays well, and allows for a lot of sightseeing. You can take on brief stints providing family-practice type medical care to remote communities in Northern Canada, or in expat compounds in various parts of the world. You can volunteer for an organisation like MSF and go on missions to war and disaster areas. You can take some time out of clinical medicine and do research, earning yourself a Master’s degree or a PhD. If you have the savings or a partner who can support you, you can exit medicine entirely, and be a stay-home parent, or do something really different: go to pastry school, write a book, build an app. I chose to do something very safe and conventional, because I’m a very safe and conventional person but also because I have two children and a home loan. I applied for a fellowship.
Medically speaking, doing a fellowship is kind of like building an extra storey onto your house, or upgrading one of its wings. You expand the breadth and depth of your skills, and add some attractive lines to your CV. Growing my career through a fellowship was important to me, but also my husband and I wanted to do something different and exciting. We wanted to take a break from our ‘real’ life. We wanted to live through a winter of snow. We wanted to see bands and shows that never make it down to the Southern tip of Africa. We wanted our children to experience a foreign school system, we wanted to shop in new grocery stores, we wanted to camp and hike and canoe in random places that we wouldn’t ever travel to from South Africa.
If you Google the term ‘gap year’ you’ll get plenty of results. Gapyear.com states that ‘A gap year is constructive time out to travel between life stages.’ The space between high school and University is perfect for a gap year. You check out of school, go overseas and wait tables or volunteer or work in a warehouse, and then start whatever’s next. The space between finishing one job and starting another, which is the space I was approaching could be good for a gap year… if it actually is a space. When I was thinking about my ‘time out’ of South Africa, I was thinking about all those travelly things — the snow and the hiking and the canoeing and the bands and the stores, the things people take vacations to foreign places for — but also, I wanted a year or two of mental space. I thought (or perhaps, convinced myself) that simply doing something a bit different, in a very different place, for a limited period of time, would be enough to give me that space. Briefly, I wanted to live without a long-term plan, focusing instead on time with my family, in the here and now. I wanted to feel briefly less tethered by my obligations, less cemented to my responsibilities. I wanted to take a break from thinking about the decades ahead and what I needed to do to stay solvent and stable and sane in order to survive them. I had finished specialising and didn’t have my Forever job lined up. There was what looked like a space ahead, and maybe it was the space I’d been wanting.
In retrospect, it’s ridiculous to think that joining a competitive training program at an academic hospital in a major North American city would offer me that kind of mental space. I’m sure many people reading this are thinking that if we’d really been serious about hitting the pause button and taking a proper break, we would have saved up a pile of cash and gone somewhere remote to do yoga for a year. Those people are probably right, but honestly, as an adult couple, with not a massive amount of financial capital, and a pair of children, there’s a whole lot of glue in our lives that is hard to break loose from. A home loan, foundation-phase schooling, pension contributions, medical insurance — I could go on with the long and boring list of things that don’t stop needing attention just because you want to stop giving it, but probably you’re also an adult living in the 21st century and know exactly what I’m talking about. We needed to do something that would pay our bills and allow our children to get what they needed in terms of education and socialisation. And also, deep down, we weren’t brave enough to briefly shelve the careers we’d been working so hard at for the past decade. We wanted the ‘constructive’ part of the time out that gapyear.com talks about: we wanted to do something that would actually add to our skills, that wouldn’t be seen as lost time when we started job-hunting again.
My fellowship has been many things and I’ll probably be processing and re-evaluating it for years to come, but a mental break it was not. Our life as temporary residents of a place far from home has also been many things, but an escape from our obligations was not one of them. Our time in this space and place is still far from done but I can say already: it has been a privilege, an experience we’ll never regret, an adventure, an opportunity — all these things and more — but it has not been a gap between stages of our lives. It has been a stage of its own.
Can grown-ups have gap years? Yes, maybe, if they are less financially committed or were more diligent about saving than me. Maybe if they have more courage than me, and are brave enough to step briefly away from the world they have built for themselves, confident that it won’t crumble in their absence. Grown-ups can switch careers or emigrate or change their lives in a thousand ways, but can they actually take a break from them? I don’t know.
