1995: My First Gap Year Experience - #23

Graduated from the Corporate World and Figuring It Out

Welcome to the first post picking up my memoir where I left off at the beginning of 1995, ready to return to New York City to start a new life chapter after spending the New Year holiday in Waimanalo, Oʻahu. If you are a reader just joining me for the first time, I would encourage you to hit “subscribe now” and enter your email address so you will get a welcome email with all the previous installments in order. Plus future writing will come to you by email so you donʻt miss an exciting episode! Well - the years 1992 - 1994 were pretty exciting anyway. The whole point of the current essay is just how unexciting I needed 1995 to be. Good thing the Universe had a design for my next steps…

As I read over and edited my rough draft of this piece, for the first time I noticed the thread of unexamined privilege in my story so far. Oops. Like a revealing wardrobe malfunction on someone whose elegance I had admired, privilege is something that once I see, I canʻt unsee. I am curious how this noticing will change my writing and reflections on my memories going forward. So letʻs talk about that privilege.

My upbringing was conventionally middle class, my parents first generation college graduates thanks to the G.I. Bill rewarding their service in WWII. Their solid jobs providing three nutritious meals a day and a secure roof over our heads, combined with their Greatest Generation push towards higher education for their children, served as a catapult out into a world where I could succeed according to the societally accepted metrics of academic achievement, financial security, and professional advancement. Being a woman had its challenges in those contexts, but I was petite, well-educated, white, and otherwise non-threatening.

During the three years that are about to unfold, I could go on a journey of self-discovery without worrying about a paycheck. I can say that now with some detachment, feeling neither pride nor shame. But it bears acknowledging that even the idea of being able to take a gap year between high school and college, or between college and “real life,” or between Wall Street life and a different life, is something only a tiny fraction of humanity could imagine and for me today simply reeks of privilege.

And yet, I would rather have had a values reset, in whatever form and at whatever cost, than to have continued on the path on which I was hurtling along in my 20s and early 30s.

As a young person I hurried through school, eager to set my own course in life. I skipped fourth grade and let my junior year of high school become my senior year when the family moved and I switched schools. Thatʻs how I came to be the youngest graduate of the Bear Creek High School Class of 1972. Then I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado in three years before going immediately into my first professional job at barely nineteen years of age.

Through my twenties and early thirties I just kept sprinting ahead. I picked up a Ph.D along the way, naturally skipping the Masters degree. Only the 13th woman to be awarded a doctorate by the Colorado School of Mines, I took it for granted that my path to success was to tolerate the paternalistic norms, beating the guys at their game with my intellect, fearlessness, and the secret superpower of my feminine relationship skills (coincidentally, the term “emotional intelligence” was popularized in 1995).

Holding my own in a technical discussion in an underground coal mine in 1987.

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It took a lot for me to step off that path. It took three years of the extraordinary experiences I have been writing about, most of them exhilaratingly fun.

Picking up the story line of those years from where I ended in 1994, I may have thought I was proceeding with a leap of faith, but I was still a driven workaholic. I returned to New York fired up and ready to rock and roll after New Years in Hawaiʻi with Velvalee. I had projects lined up, more projects in mind, maybe not a financially viable business plan yet - but I assumed without a second thought that I was just making a smooth transition from Wall Street Me to the New Me, bringing that same drive to a new focus.

Had I learned nothing from the three years of extraordinary experiences that finally coaxed me out of my corporate aerie?

Apparently not. Maybe still not. When I decided to continue writing chronologically, I figured I could pretty much skip 1995, a year when “hardly anything happened”. No life-changing trips to Tibet or dramatic synchronicities or big romantic relationships with famous men. It took a week of trying to find my way into writing something meaningful about 1995 to start to appreciate this subtle transition year.

During 1995 I had plenty to do that I felt good about doing - and also walked around with a sense of shame around the absence of immediate bragging-rights notable accomplishments justifying my choice to leave my path of success. That negative self-assessment persisted despite feedback to the contrary. One evening I saw JP Morgan CEO Sandy Warner at a fundraiser at the Cathedral of St John the Divine. I walked over to greet him, a bit nervous that there would be hard feelings about my departure from the Bank. Sandy smiled warmly as we shook hands. “I donʻt know what it is you are doing, Beth, but you made the right decision. You look radiant,” were his words. He saw instantly, perhaps not even consciously, that radiance was evidence of my “accomplishment”.

Imagine that…I was called to be a Warrior of the Light, and now my light was shining. That was a new metric for success although I did not see it at the time.

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My enduring internal narrative that 1995 was an unimportant year is going to have to be set aside for the next few weeks as I tell the stories that are asking to be told.

All of this has been a roundabout way of getting to the first of those stories: the context itself. In 1995, it was finally time for me to have a “gap year.” At the time I did not know that term - or that Gap Year is what 1995 would become. Today I completely appreciate the value of young people taking a year between high school and college, or between college and what comes next (though I am appalled to discover what a big business packaged, choreographed gap year programs has become). When I started reflecting on 1995 as a Gap Year, I found titles of guidebooks to the experience that expressed what it meant to me perfectly:

• Gap Year: How Delaying College Changes Peoples in Ways the World Needs by Joseph O’Shea

• Gap Year, American Style: Journeys Toward Learning, Serving, and Self Discovery by Karl Haigler

A year of experience that changes people in ways the world needs, through journeys toward learning, serving, and self discovery? I am pretty sure we could all use a gap year, maybe even multiple gap years, through the course of our lives. Years we allow ourselves to be in transition, in not-knowing, in figuring things out, whether a year we have the privilege of choosing or a year that kicks us in the teeth. Feel free to quote me if you need support for naming your current situation, whatever it might be, as a much-needed, valuable gap year. Feel free to call me for moral support along the way. Iʻll be the one intoning in that London Underground automated voice “Mind the Gap!”

If you miss this train, thereʻs another one a few minutes behind. Donʻt just jump aboard; be mindful of the gap.