My Gap Year

In coastal geography, a tombolo is a narrow dynamic ribbon of sand that connects an offshore island to the mainland.  According to geologists, the two land masses aren’t considered one bigger one; to the contrary, the tombolo typically connects two geologically distinguishable pieces of land.  This is hard for me to internalize – it sounds to me like the “Schrödinger’s cat” of geology.  The small bit of land at the end of a tombolo is both an island and a not-island at the same time.

One of the largest active sand tombolos ties St. Ninian’s Island to the Shetland Island mainland.  It’s very striking visually; there is a beach with coastal waves on both sides of the tombolo, and, if you’re lucky (like I was), you can wind up as the only person standing in between the two land masses, feet in the cold sand, being buffeted by the winds and listening to the sounds of two different waves crashing in rhythm.

At that moment, calmness covered me like honey.  I wanted to find the right word to describe my feeling and wound up settling on two alternatives:  isolation or solitude.  But which?  I initially conceived of those words as interchangeable, but they couldn’t be more different.  Isolation comes from the Latin “insula” meaning to make into an island or detach.  Solitude comes from the Latin word “solus” meaning alone, single or sole.

My life has, until now, overflowed with intense feelings of isolation.  Some of that goes with the territory of depression.  My depression started in college, and I can remember forcing myself to go to parties despite feeling cut off from the events around me, being an outsider who was not understood (or understandable) and wondering what was wrong with me.  I was on an island, located far offshore without a tombolo in sight.

Instead of battling against these feelings of isolation, as a coping mechanism I leaned into them.  I had seen the movie “Altered States,” and became fascinated by isolation or sensory-deprivation tanks.  The tank is exactly as advertised:  it is filled with body-temperature water with enough salt to make you buoyant, and, once the door to the tank closes, there is no light or sound.  As you float, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where your body ends and where the water begins. I didn’t know what to expect when I first tried the tank – it was in some guy’s house on the outskirts of campus, and, for all I knew, he was going to gradually turn up the heat and boil me like a frog.

The one hour I spent in the tank felt like 10 minutes.  I completely lost myself; I disconnected from my life and forgot about being alone.  Without external stimulation, I turned inward with fascination.I was enmeshed in the fabric of my mind and my imagination and, in that state of being, people didn’t matter.  It was probably my first anti-depressant; my mind felt reshaped when my time in the tank ended.  I began using the tank regularly, gradually increasing the amount of time I spent in isolation from an hour all the way up to four hours at a time.  This intentional isolation was my answer to the overwhelming feelings I experienced; better to have my mind and imagination run wild in an alternate reality than to have to focus on my everyday life and the way it made me feel.

Isolation requires boundaries to exist.  I suppose I was also subconsciously drawn towards isolation in order to preserve the boundaries that I always believed I needed – boundaries to keep anyone from getting too close to me (or me to them), boundaries to keep my feelings under wraps, and boundaries to maintain a sense of control over my life and what parts of me I shared with others.  The boundaries created with isolation make it impossible to be understood or absorb empathy from another.  If someone doesn’t know you or what drives you, anything supportive or emotional they may offer just feels fake.  You’re just a reflection of what they feel or think and that compounds your own feelings of isolation.

For a long time before I started planning my gap year in earnest, I decided that it was important for me to travel alone.  I defended my desire against those who asked me whether I’d be lonely, or bored, or missing out on having shared experiences.  It may be an indication of my innate stubbornness (which, God knows, I’m guilty of), but nothing anyone said to me caused me to hesitate for one moment with respect to the solo nature of my trip.

Could I be alone without feeling isolated?

On that tombolo in the Shetland Islands, I discovered the difference between isolation and solitude.  As silly as it might sound, I thought about Superman’s “Fortress of Solitude” – his sanctuary where he could drop his guard and exist entirely as himself.  I stretched out my arms and spun around in the sand on my skinny little beach in Scotland like Mary Tyler Moore, having the space to myself, but embracing the sensory experience – the cold snap of the wind, the stereophonic sound of the waves, the screech of the seagulls, the smell of the seaweed washed up on the beach and the taste of the salt air.  Rather than eliminating sensory inputs, I drank deeply from the cup I was handed.

I was alone, but I was part of the world.  And I wasn’t being forced to be something I wasn’t; I had no one to impress, no one whose judgment I needed to avoid, no need to escape being who I was (depression and all).  Isolation feels beyond one’s control; solitude is a matter of choice.  That moment validated my decision to take this year to travel by myself – to travel “solo.”

Tombolos are not static.  During high tide, the path narrows, and conversely widens during low tides.  Solitude is like that.  It doesn’t require building a concrete bridge to have a permanent, immutable connection to the world.  It allows for a living, adaptable connection that can ebb and flow with the time and tides of everyday life. Solitude can coexist with attachment to those you love.

I still do sensory deprivation tanks, and feel like, every now and again, they’re a nice escape from reality.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they just create a different reality.  Either way, I’m looking forward to enjoying the solitude.