I'm taking a grown-up gap year in 2025

here's why & how & what that even means

Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life. Thank you for being here with me!

print by Abacus Corvus Artwork

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My dear reader.

The first time I heard the term “gap year” I was 24 years old, working as the director of a children’s summer day camp and living in a small guest house that was originally touted as being “partially furnished” in the rental listing — a phrase that was clearly a euphemism for “the landlord has yet to remove an ancient microwave and a broken couch from the otherwise empty two-room space”).

I didn’t own anything back than except for clothes, toiletries, a laptop, a cellphone, and a few books, which is how I was able to move back and forth between Southern California (camp job) and NYC (where I lived with my boyfriend in an apartment that was filled with all his stuff).

Working at that camp was a semi-seasonal thing — I was part-time from January through May, which is when I’d create all the programming for each of the nine weeks of camp, handle registration for hundreds of families, order all of the necessary supplies, schedule buses for field trips, and hire/train my 20+ person staff while also working a retail job and sometimes a nannying job as well, which is what I had to do to pay my bills. Then from June through August I’d quit the other jobs as camp season entered what I called manic frantic go-go time, during which I was working 11+ hours a day, five or six days a week.

I was halfway through one of those manic frantic go-go times when I read a blog post by a 19-year-old Australian guy who was about to embark on his gap year, a year of travel and exploration taken between high school and college that seemed to be a well-known tradition in certain countries (and, of course, only within certain social classes) that I had somehow never heard of before.

Okay, what the hell, I thought. Why didn’t I know about this! And how can I make something similar happen as soon as possible?

That was the summer of 2009, and I’ll finally be taking my own version of a grown-up gap year in 2025.

Sometimes “as soon as possible” takes 16 years, you know?

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The initial dream

In 2009 all I wanted to do was travel — anywhere, everywhere.

On my days off from the camp job I haunted the travel section of Barnes & Noble, pulling stacks of Lonely Planet books off the shelf and sitting down to read them right there in the middle of the aisle.

I found the online universe of travel blogging and fantasized about stepping into that role myself. I read Vagabonding, I read The 4-Hour Workweek, I read about bucket lists and planning a multi-stop flight route and how to travel the world on less than $50 a day.

I even planned a three-month backpacking trip through South America to kick things off — not the kind of backpacking I do now with a tent and a pee rag but the kind with a bunkbed at a youth hostel and a higher-than-average chance of hooking up with someone who didn’t speak my language. (The dream, at age 24!)

But then I just… didn’t go.

It’s not safe for you to travel alone, people said.

What about your career, they said.

You’ll be wasting your education.

Don’t you want to get married and have a family?

Better to stay here and get on with real life.

And I listened. To some of it, anyway. I internalized just enough of everyone else’s fears to let my adventurous gap year plan fade quietly into the distance.

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The current dream

In the almost 16 years that have passed between the summer of 2009 and now, between being 24 and almost 40, so much has happened.

I quit that camp job and have been self-employed ever since. I lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Bend. I got sober. I became an athlete, completing 10 half marathons and 5 full marathons before eventually getting into long-distance hiking. I’ve backpacked more than 5,600 miles. I got married and divorced and married again. I lived in a 20 square foot van. I moved to Massachusetts. I came out as queer, finally. I became a dog person, inconceivably. I grew into my anti-capitalism, fiercely, proudly.

And through it all I never quite let go of that initial desire for a gap year, a sabbatical, a year of exploration and imagination. But just as my life (and self) has changed in significant ways since 2009, so has the vision I hold for my gap year. Here’s what I currently want:

• To deprioritize work/earning and feel what happens in my body and mind as a result (who am I without work?)

• To settle more deeply into the town I’ve chosen as my (hopefully!) forever home (hyperlocal friendships, community fun, place-based activism)

• To prioritize my health, well-being, and fitness in a wholly new way

• To do so many house/farm projects with Gent (expanding our garden, building an off-grid outdoor kitchen, adding a heat pump, planting an orchard, adding insulation wherever we can and just generally weatherizing our 174-year-old house more efficiently)

• To upskill in the realm of food (growing it, preserving it, cooking it)

• To intentionally increase my collapse resilience (building up a larger store of food, transitioning to a much lower energy/fossil-fueled lifestyle, doing some kind of first aid training, deepening my grief and death literacy)

• To read lots of books, complete my multi-year herbalism course, presence my personal & spiritual practices in a more significant way, and explore any new interests and curiosities that arise throughout the year

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How I’m funding this

The core reason I spent 16 years dreaming about a gap year but not actually taking a gap year is exactly the reason you’d probably guess: money.

I just couldn’t figure out how it would ever be possible to earn enough money to pay for my current life, my longer term savings goals, and amass a year’s worth of cash to spend on a sabbatical, all at the same time. No matter how I looked at it the math just wouldn’t math.

So, what’s changed?

In June I wrote an in-depth essay about my decision to begin divesting from the stock market, and in that piece I shared a full breakdown (with specific numbers) of everything I plan to do with that money instead — including the money I chose to earmark for my gap year.

Ideally I won’t need to use all of the money I’ve set aside, since I’ll still be getting income from Substack (the one part of my business I’m not shutting down for the year) and from book sales (which is mostly just a few hundred dollars of passive monthly revenue at this point, but it still counts/helps!), so depending on what my actual incoming cash flow looks like in 2025 I’ll then decide how much money I need to pull from my gap year fund each month to help pay for my life.

I’ll be writing a quarterly money recap about all of this next year (thanks to everyone who expressed interest in that kind of series and helped me think through it in the comments of the most recent Tiny Biz Letters!) and I’m honestly so curious to see how the financial side of this sabbatical ends up looking and feeling for me throughout the year.

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What I’m most nervous about

• No really: who am I without work?!

• Will people judge me (or resent me) for not working?

• So much of my current creative fulfillment and relational interaction comes through my job. Will I be bored and lonely without it?

• Will taking this gap year torpedo my business and future earning potential in some unforeseen and unrecoverable way?

• Is it totally stupid to spend down tens of thousands of dollars instead of saving those dollars in a more “responsible” way? (Or just giving the money away, which of course I could be doing instead.)

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What I’m most excited about

• Entire days (weeks?!) of not opening my laptop

• Spending so much more time outside

• Learning new skills (and probably, to be honest, an entirely new way of being)

• Getting to know my neighbors better (humans, plants, animals, insects, soil, weather, watershed)

• Doing 1-2 long-distance hikes without needing to check my email or keep to a super tight timeline

• Doing all the deep-dive research and experimentation of my dreaaaaams (bread baking! building a more just economy! strength training! reimagining retirement! witchcraft! disability justice! fluid gender expression! permaculture!)

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How I’m preparing

• Talking about it more (with myself, my beloveds, my readers) to help normalize what I’m doing in my own mind and the minds of those I’m in relationship with

• Steadily working through my gap year off-ramp to-do list, aka the task list of what I want/need to do in order to close down my business for a year (I shared this list in the most recent TBL, if you’re curious)

• Not making any plans for 2025 just yet (this might seem like a strange prep step, but I have a real tendency to overcommit and plan things way too far in advance, which I do not want to do this time around — especially when what I’m craving most with this gap year is plenty of spaciousness for spontaneity and intuition and surprise; “what do I feel like doing today?” vs “oh shit I’ve already committed to X, Y, and Z so I better hustle and get into it!”)

• Taking deep breaths and being sweet and tender with myself whenever I freak out about money/work/how others will react to me doing such a “weird” thing

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What this means for you

Well, dear reader, I will indeed still be writing here on Wild Letters in 2025, and the main reason I decided to keep this part of my business open is that, honestly, I am more me, and more well, when I’m writing in this way — by which I mean writing and sharing that writing and being in conversation with you about what’s on my mind and what’s on yours, too. A private writing practice just does not fulfill me in the same way, and so I want to keep this channel open. (The income will be hugely helpful too, of course!)

My current vision for what we do here together next year includes: essays, the What’s Working column, the monthly Rose Thorn Bud podcast, that new quarterly personal money deep dive I mentioned earlier, plus sporadic installments of my How Much Money is Enough? research project.

Everything I offer on Substack in 2025 will be for paid readers only — not as a way to ungenerously withhold my work from those who don’t pay for it (that’s not my vibe, and I hope you know that by now!) but simply because the smaller audience size and financial reciprocity of the paid container is what allows me to have the relational experience I want without the feeling of over-exposure and energetic burnout that I often struggle with when writing and creating for a much larger audience, which is something I want to be particularly mindful about in the next year.

I’ll also be pausing payments at various points throughout the year, such as when I’ll be out on long hikes and not creating anything for a month or so, or even during months when I’m at home but want to experience more of a true sabbatical. When this happens readers who are subscribed to monthly payment plans simply won’t be charged, and readers on annual plans will get an extra month added onto their renewal date for each month that payments are paused. Easy!

The rest of my business will be closed (coworking groups, workshops, etc); my gift economy offering (Workbooks For The People) will remain open; and then in 2026… who knows! A complete and total mystery!

May it unfold in delightfully surprising ways.

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More soon—

Nic