Three reminders for my future self

Important lessons I've learned from my gap year that I fear will be easily forgotten

Some days I stop and count the months since I last worked. (For those of you who are new to What Would A White Man Do, you can read more about my adult gap year here.)

It’s been six months since I started my gap year and some days, that feels like forever while on others, it feels like it’s gone by in the blink of an eye. Occasionally, I worry that when I go back to work, the gap year will feel like something I dreamt up that didn’t really happen. I also worry that I’ll forget how I feel right now and the important lessons I’ve learned. Today, I’m leaving future me some notes.

Time is so elastic – wait for the moments where it feels just right:

There have been a few moments over the past few months when I’ve stopped in a given moment and realized that time finally felt like it was passing at the right speed. There was no feeling of impatience for an exciting event that was around the corner, and there was no feeling of dread that the present moment was coming to a close. Instead, I was just content and grateful for where I was and what I was doing.

It's an elusive feeling. When I was working, it was rare to just be able to sit with the present moment and instead, I often felt I was oscillating between impatience or dread.

Future me: This feeling will probably be harder to achieve once back at work, but keep looking for it. I promise it exists.

Hold onto the feeling of being me:

Other than perhaps childhood, I have never felt so completely me in my life. I’ve always felt that the space to really be me – as a human being – had to exist outside of the daytime school/work hours.

Nowadays, I am Human Being Me 24/7. There is very little reason not to spend my time meeting my physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual needs, and doing what matters the most to me as a person. There is nothing else that takes up space and pulls me away from those things.

Whether it’s dropping everything to have a conversation with a friend in a moment of need, spending a whole day on “human body maintenance” (think: nourishing meals, exercising, and getting a massage), or taking hours to reorganize my apartment so it feels right, nothing takes priority over trying to be the best version of myself. Some days that means showing up 1000% for my family and friends, and on other days, that means spending the whole day on a new idea or topic that has taken my interest to nourish my brain.

I’m truly in awe that I have the chance to feel this as an adult and experience life this way. It is an incredible privilege to be able to do this. It’s made me feel very in tune with myself. In some ways, perhaps this has led to some of my questions around identity: is it enough if my identity is simply “I am me”? Regardless of the answer, there is still an invaluable lesson here of prioritizing what matters the most to each of us instead of always fixating on goals and signposts.

I’m not going to be on this adult gap year forever, so…

Future me: Please keep making dedicated time (and if possible, days!) for maintenance, whether it’s for my body, my soul, my mind, or all the above.

When you’re your own boss, it’s still good to set boundaries:

This will probably resonate a lot with the planners/organizers out there.

Even in this state of existence as just me, I still find myself overwhelmed at times. The errands seem to pile up endlessly and often I stop and wonder how I did this while working full time. Because I supposedly have infinite time to do errands as an adult gap yearer, they often seem to expand to fill all the space available. And, add in the reality that with every additional life event or trip, there are exponentially more errands.

To keep this manageable – and to not always feel like I’m constantly finishing one errand only to stumble into five more – I’ve started to batch the days when I tackle each project/errand. As an example, I generally use the first of the month to book flights and hotels for travel. The rest of the time, I don’t let myself mindlessly research those domains. When I have a new life project – whether it’s moving or organizing an event or something else – I try to embargo when I’ll tackle that errand. I decide on a weeklong window where I’m allowed to do research and make required bookings and whatnot for a given project – the rest of the time, I don’t let myself think about that given topic.

On a related note, I’ve caught myself sometimes manufacturing extra errands to feel more productive. As much as I believe that productivity as a concept is overrated, I also cannot stop trying to track and attain it.

Slowly, I’ve come up with a way to win this game against my own habits. I’ve started to redefine what productivity means. Nowadays, if on a given day, I took care of my body and my soul and my mind, then I was productive. I don’t have to have output to show for it – I just need to feel good.

Future me: Remember to keep redefining productivity to work for me. And set boundaries to make the pursuit of productivity manageable.   

Tl;dr

There are some important lessons I’ve learned while on my adult gap year. On the topic of time, I’ve learned to live in the moment. On the topic of identity: I’ve learned to embrace being simply me and learned how to put myself first. On the topic of productivity: I’ve learned how to manage the pursuit of productivity in order to make it work for me.