surviving my seismic season
my unexpected journey to a gap year at 30
My name is Lauren. A few weeks ago, I quit my job in big tech to travel the world, after ending an 8 year relationship, finding love again, shattering my leg in a road accident and surrendering to the concept of living a wild and precious life. This is my story.
My last post started with an ultimatum: quit my job for a year of travel or continue living how I’ve always lived: with work, routine, comfort. It turns out that it would take a literal earthquake to shake me into submission. In this post, I pick up where I left off. The world shook and, with it, something inside me shifted too.
My survival instincts are pretty questionable. This will come as a great disappointment to my dad, who taught me to plot fire-safe escape routes in hotel rooms, stash space blankets in the back of the car and encouraged me - if I had to (?!) - to eat his flesh to survive a desert island plane crash.1
In reality, ‘survival’ in my day-to-day life describes a day filled with back-to-back Zoom calls, enduring a nasty hangover or accidentally typing ‘apologies for the incontinence’ instead of ‘inconvenience’ to someone important at work.
So when you find yourself off the beaten track in Taiwan, with a rather large earthquake rattling the contents of your hotel room, you think….”well….shit.”
Not a bone in my body kicked into action. I didn’t run for the doorway or seek cover under the desk. I just stared at Tim, blankly, who was also in frozen disbelief. “I think this is an earthquake”, I stuttered, my voice jolting to the rhythm of the shaking earth. Tim, with a similar stammer, replied “yes”.
In fiction, earthquakes are used as literary devices to symbolise sudden, uncontrollable disruption.2 They also mirror internal tremors; emotional, existential. I reflected - in the way all sensitive souls do - on my life quakes of late. The tremors that began with the end of my eight year relationship, to now, the looming crescendo - question - of leaving everything behind.
Thankfully, after about twenty seconds, stillness returned.
Everything was a little out of place.
After being woken by the 6.1-magnitude earthquake, we visited the 921 Earthquake Museum of Taiwan, curious to understand how the Taiwanese live on such unstable ground. One exhibit caught me off guard. Tucked into the museum’s narrative was a simple display showing how some of Taiwan’s earthquakes have given birth to waterfalls. Formed by landslides, shifted riverbeds and collapsed cliffs, new waterfalls surge wild and free, carving fresh paths into the landscape. It was a striking metaphor: destruction making way for something unexpectedly beautiful. Rebirth, not in spite of the quake—but because of it.
This notion stayed with me as we continued to our final stop in Taiwan, Alishan. Alishan is an area famous for forest-covered mountains, ancient cypress trees and dreamlike scenery. It was magic. Rain fell from the sky in thick, gloopy droplets. The mist curled around my limbs like an invitation. Once again, the earth seemed to speak to me with slow, steady wisdom.
Standing beneath the trees, as the rain pelted against the hood of my anorak, I was faced with the truth of my own insignificance. My life but a breath to this ancient woodland. For the first time, I saw a different kind of future for myself. A quiet rebirth rising from the rubble of my own seismic season. The heartbreak, the house sale, the brutal recovery from a shattered leg and unexpectedly falling in love again. It all felt like it had cracked my foundations open. Not to destroy, but to clear space. To make room for something new to grow. Something wild. Something mine.
I had made up my mind.
Not with a bang but with a whisper of rustling leaves.
I have one wild and precious life.
And with it,
I’m going to see the world.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading my series about my unexpected journey to a gap year at 30. You can catch up on all my posts here. Next stop: the world. Consider subscribing if you’d like to follow my journey.
Inspired, no doubt, by the 1993 film Alive.
In reality, earthquakes also mean death. The recent Myanmar earthquake took the lives of 3000 souls and counting. My thoughts are with anyone from this community impacted.