If Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge…

When I was seventeen, the summer before my senior year in high school, several of my friends came to visit me at the Rhode Island shore where my family lived during the summer months. It was a Sunday morning and in that teenage, snowballing way that ideas become actions before logic can catch up, we suddenly found ourselves piling into cars and standing on the ledge of the Goat Island Bridge.

Two local boys with us immediately tore off their shirts and jumped straight over the barricade and cannonballed into the water. The rest of us stood in a line peering into the dark water churning from where they resurfaced. We were all in a mishmash of underwear and swimwear clinging to the lamp post and balanced haphazardly on the concrete barricade. There was tittering and various dares and the “no, you go first!”s whispered as we all contemplated the distance downward. It was a long drop. The water was even deeper, a dark opaque navy blue broken only by the froth of the boys below egging us on.

I was quiet, looking down at the drop. Deciding how/if I was going to take that first and only step off. If? Was there an “If”? Would I really step down off this barricade and be the one too chicken to jump? No. That wasn’t an option. I was going to definitely jump off this bridge this morning.

And a part of me just said “Then just do it already.”

And so without saying a word, I walked off that barricade and plunged into the freezing water below.

I resurfaced coughing and laughing as soon the others followed, shrieking at the cold and the recklessness of it. We pulled ourselves up on the dock and raced back up the road to do it, again and again, that morning.

I still find myself remembering that day and the internal conversation with myself. It’s been over 16 years and I can feel the warm and gritty concrete under my feet and the icy rush of the water as I went under. And that conversation. If you know you’re going to do it, do it already. What’s the point of fear in the face of something that’s going to be done anyway? The fear never gets quieter, if anything it gets louder, finding more reasons for you to plant your butt firmly on solid ground and find a safer way to spend your morning.

But. If I know this is something I want to do eventually, why not just step off the edge and do it already?

I find myself at a crossroads these days, surrounded by options, ideas, and changes and often paralyzed with the existential crisis you can only find as your well-laid-out plan goes belly up. Or the constant worry of, can I really afford to do this? Can I afford not to?

But there remains that niggling voice that reminds me that often this is something I want to do, something I plan on doing, a goal, a bucket list item, a step towards a larger goal for the future, for how and who I want to be. And I think of who I want that future me to be. And I think about the steps of how to get to her. And I tell myself the same thing I did overlooking the dark water of the Narragansett Bay,

Just do it already.