l'année sabbatique
"Now she rallies her defenses/For she fears that one will ask her/For eternity/And she's so busy being free" - Joni Mitchell, "Cactus Tree"
Paris… the city of light, love, and where I ran away to at 19 in an attempt to get space from my problems. Full of hope that it would give me perspective and help me fix them. Not my most original idea, decamping to Paris, but I followed in some spectacular footsteps–from Ernest Hemingway and Herman Miller to Mary Cassatt and Daniel Roseberry, so many incredible creatives took the same pilgrimage.
After a particularly hellish freshman year, I took a leave of absence from WashU–or dropped out, as my brothers love to tell everyone– knowing that I needed a break before whatever would come next. I had originally planned to transfer, expecting to switch to NYU and live the city girl life of my dreams. However, in a strange moment of wisdom, something I am eternally thankful for, I decided I needed to take a break; I had to reject NYUs offer of enrollment. Between 2013-2015, I applied to colleges on three separate occasions: senior year of high school, to transfer as a freshman, and again to transfer during my gap year. Comical, as I ended up graduating from that original choice I made at 18, even with the other options I later got into.
My mother had actually wanted me to take a gap year after my senior year, but getting away from my high school and suburban Philadelphia took up my every thought; college seemed like the easiest and fastest way to do that. Like many 27 year-olds, I’ve had to accept that at that moment, my mother really did know best, and like many of those same 27 year-olds, at 18 I made a lot of questionable choices.
To give myself some credit, making the choice to not follow the prescribed path, especially as an academically successful young adult, is not easy. From the moment I decided to take a break from higher education until I went back a year later, I heard constantly from the adults around me about how lovely and brave a choice I had made, but they’d never let their children do the same. I had people repeatedly telling me the incorrect statistic that only 13% of people who take time off college ever return.* This statistic refers to students who withdraw, fully dropping out. While my brothers always say that I dropped out, and at this point I’ve adopted that sentiment, in this case the fact of my leave of absence matters immensely. In actuality, the true statistic for people who take purposeful gap years settles around a 90% re-enrollment rate.*
While I genuinely believe that taking time off tops the list of best decisions I’ve ever made, I deeply feared telling anyone that I wouldn’t be returning to college for my sophomore year– embarrassed that they would view me as a failure. I remember sometime during that summer I went to pick up food from a nearby restaurant for my family. While there I ran into a few boys from my high school graduating class– none of whom were particularly offensive, I had no strong opinions on any of them. But I still hid from them, terrified that they would see me and ask about school. I couldn’t bring myself to even risk talking to them, assuming that my perceived failures would quickly spread through my 72 person graduating class. Everyone I had fought so hard for 4 years to view me in one way, immediately viewing me as the opposite because I failed at higher education. Completely irrational, but the fear ran deeper than my ability to talk myself into rationality.
I didn’t settle on deciding not to go to NYU until the absolute last moment, as summer started. Because of that, the expanse of my first year not in school since age 2 stood completely empty of plans. At the beginning of the summer I tried to get a job, preferably in a restaurant. It did not pan out. I ended up taking on random gig work, like helping a family friend weed their garden, where I promptly got Lyme disease and did not leave the couch again until August. You’d think that all the time spent horizontal with nothing to do that I’d start planning for the coming year. I did not. In my defense, Lyme knocked me out completely. Every possible joint imaginable felt like a water balloon filled to absolute bursting, but unable to explode. Then the medication made me beyond exhausted. I barely read, barely watched TV, I only slept.
The week before I started to show symptoms, I went to the beach with my family. On this trip I read My Paris Dream by Kate Betts. After Betts graduates from Princeton, unsure of what she wants to do next, she moves to Paris for a newspaper internship and to figure out what she wants for her future. Ultimately Betts ends up becoming a renowned fashion editor, which drew me in at 19. While I read, I did not think forward to planning for the coming year. However, it definitely left enough of a mark that when I did start thinking about what to do, I gravitated to Paris. After I recovered, with September just over the horizon, I jumped immediately into planning. Freaking out that for the first time in my conscious life I wouldn’t have somewhere I needed to be starting in September, I rushed into deciding.
After googling what to do during a gap year, two options stood out to me: the Semester at Sea program and the Education First (EF) language program in Paris. I ended up choosing Paris because it had a much simpler application process, and it started sooner. Getting a visa sounded like the hardest part, but I enjoyed going to the French embassy in DC– I stayed with my grandmother who lives in the area; I felt glamorous getting to traipse around with the diplomats. I believe that I did inadequate research; I think there would have been so many other programs that would have interested me more. I don’t regret choosing Paris, but I scrambled to pick something to do– fearing that if I didn’t settle on an opportunity, I’d lose all momentum and end up stuck at my mother’s house for the foreseeable future.
I chose a 6 month language immersion program starting in mid September with a weeklong break for the holidays. A quick turn around from decision to leaving, I had to figure out timing for the visa and flights without much warning. Thankfully it all worked out, shockingly the French embassy processes academic visa applications rapidly– or at least they did in 2015. On September 13th, 2015, I moved into a 4 person dorm room in a beautiful boarding house just steps from the famous Folies Bergère cabaret theater. I had two Dutch roommates and one from Germany; it all seemed so exciting and cosmopolitan.
Everything started off on a lovely foot, when I landed at de Gaulle I met up with Kate, a North Carolina native taking a semester off from her Junior year at the University of Alabama. Education First had arranged transportation for all the students flying in to get to their residences. Kate planned to stay with a host family, but my mother preferred that I live in the dorms. Kate was the first friend I made on that trip, and we still catch up regularly. Shocking to me, she was one of the only other Americans in the program. As a US based company, I incorrectly expected the group to be primarily made up of other people from the states. I met and befriended people from all over the world, with some of the people I became closest to hailing from Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK.
I fled from the expected path with the knowledge that I needed to utilize that break. I had specific motives. But mostly what I required was time to explore– to give myself the space to view my life differently. Simultaneously, and because of this goal, I felt incredibly lost in regards to my life and my future. My path, both academically and personally– I had been through a terrible break up that year– felt as though it had dissolved, and I needed to sort through what had been there to figure out where I even wanted to go next. I sought freedom to make my own choices, and finally trusted that I had that power to do as such.
I made incredible friends: from Kate whose ability to calm any homesickness with her simultaneous cravings for American delicacies, to Beth and Clare who forced me to take up space when I had gotten so used to making myself small. The best times I had in Paris included Beth and Clare, two British girls intent on making the most of their time in the French capital. Most of our cohort didn’t see the value of exploring every inch of the city in the same way as the three of us. In all fairness, many of them found the cost of exploration to be prohibitive, but I went into this trip knowing I’d be using all of my savings in an attempt to do as much as I possibly could.
The three of us would try new restaurants weekly, often nice ones. We’d go out dancing on the weekends, and exploring on the weekdays. During the winter, they ice skated on the Champs Élysées and the Eiffel Tower while I struggled and flailed around. We sipped delicately spiced and perfectly warmed mulled wine while wandering the Winter Festival lining the boulevards. Anytime I mentioned a museum to Clare, she’d always want to join me. One of my favorite days spent with her included a stop at the Musée de l’Orangerie, where they house many of Monet’s Water Lily paintings– most notably the giant panels that he painted as a gift for the state of France. The French government built two oval rooms explicitly to house the paintings, with the exhibit opening soon after Monet’s death. Nearly 100 years later, the breathtaking paintings embedded into the walls defy any and all of my expectations for art from that era. Getting to experience that level of wonder with a friend made the experience so much more memorable.
The way French culture integrates art and its history into the everyday made me fall so much more deeply in love with the field. During my time there I visited countless museums, making sure to see as many of the grand institutions as possible. Amidst my visits I started to keep a list of artists I wanted to research further; I still have a note in my phone titled “Arty Things” filled with names like Anna Atkins, Vassily Kandinsky, and Joan Mitchell– at 19 I had little formal art history education, so many of these names ended up being key artists from the academic canon. I currently have a retrospective book on Joan Mitchell sitting on my coffee table, so my taste hasn’t changed much in the last 8 years. To this day the Centre Pompidou, the French museum for modern and contemporary works, stands out as my favorite museum, and it was one of the only must see attractions on my most recent trip to Paris. Returning to the museum with a degree in art history brought a new level of profound joy to the experience– especially as I compare my current self and level of knowledge to the girl who made that list.
While joy and positivity filled much of my time spent in Paris, I also had some truly traumatic experiences. Although my personal record for that night is a story for another time, I’d be remiss not to mention that the November 2015 terror attacks that killed 137 people happened just half a mile from my building. Genuinely one of the most terrifying events of my life.
However, my negative experiences were not limited to terror attacks. Notably less dramatic in scale and effect on the general public, my series of terrible and abusive roommates left an incredibly deep mark. In the 6 months I lived in Paris, I had 7 roommates: first I lived in a quad room with Sophie, Elise, and Uta, after that I moved in with Clare from Boston, followed by Claire from England, then a girl from Sicily, and finally a girl from Sweden. While the Sicilian girl stole from me and ultimately got kicked out of the program, the original three left a mark on me that took a long time to wash out.
At the beginning everything started out perfectly. We’d go out drinking and exploring, cooking meals together, generally a lovely roommate experience. Come mid October, everything went sideways. They’d whisper in Dutch or German, leaving me out of conversations, making plans and not inviting me, and acting funny around me. Every issue became my fault. One day they sat me down and told me everything I was doing wrong. My personal favorite anecdote from that conversation comes from when they told me it felt like I was bragging any time I said that I had a good day or was doing well after being directly asked how I was doing. As I had just come out of an incredibly unhealthy relationship, my vulnerability led me to take all this criticism as personal flaws and attempt to mend them.
My attempts failed. One particularly rough morning, I received a text in our group chat. I had let the door slam when I left the room that morning, keeping them from sleeping. After apologizing for it, noting that I rushed out the door while dealing with a personal emergency, Sophie called me out, telling me that I made my personal problems everyone else’s problems. All stemming from waking them up at 10am with a door closing slightly too loudly. I ran from my classroom in tears.
While I sobbed in the downstairs bathroom, the administrator in the office next door listened in. Once she had deemed it long enough, she knocked on the door, checking on me. I told her my story, and she gathered the program supervisors and my roommates, hoping to facilitate a positive and productive discussion about what issues came up while living together. It was neither. Immediately after the adults laid out the circumstances and their hopes for the discussion, Sophie went off. She eviscerated me. The tears that had finally stopped flowing came back, no matter how much I tried to keep it together. As I write this, I wish I could remember what she said to me, to show the gravity, but I’ve blocked those memories. I only remember her red, angry face, my uncontrollable tears, and the shock of the faculty.
The mediation didn’t last long. Ultimately the adults broke up the conversation, sending my roommates back to class and sending me home to pack. They were moving me. They deemed the circumstances of my housing unsafe if continued. Unfortunately, we lived in a small building and I had to continue dealing with them until the end. Thankfully I made new friends who made me push through the strain of living near them and knowing they were talking about me behind my back. Regrettably, most of those friends, specifically Beth and Claire, left the program at the start of the holidays, and I had to get through the last two months on my own. Maintaining these friendships, sadly, fell beyond my reach. After they left, I never quite settled back in socially, always feeling like a third wheel while hanging with the rest of the cohort.
Not everything about my experience in Paris was great. From abusive roommates to terrorist attacks, I dealt with a lot. But it gave me exactly what I needed in order to figure out the next steps of my life. Honoring the privilege of youth and the ability to take a break from the confines of everyday life, through this trip I began to work through all that sent me running away in the first place. I came back to the US having explored not only a new part of the world, but also the space within myself that has made me the self-reflective person I am today. I needed that time, with all the positives and negatives included.
* Please see more here and here
Weekly Book Recommendations:
Media Rec’s that got me through my gap year:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I love this book. After reading it for the first time while living in Paris, it quickly skyrocketed to the top of my favorite books list. We all know the story, but my favorite romance trope is enemies to lovers, with Lizzie and Darcy starting that obsession
America’s Sweetheart by Elle King
Surrounded by primarily non-American young adults, I felt pressured to be this perfect ideal of an American. I lived in Paris when Trump announced his run for president. I constantly had to field questions about politics and racism, and had to present myself just so to not incur judgment. This song became my internal anthem.
Castle with Nathan Fillion
I have always and will always love a good crime drama. Castle held my attention during this time. I sought out good internet access just to download episodes. This was how I relaxed.
Quick footnote: I will be publishing biweekly on Wednesdays. Please let me know if you have any questions!