You stood sunburnt and freckled on a rock that jutted out of the Chetco River, steadying your small feet and squeezing your wrinkled toes to gain purchase. You would swim across the river to an outcropping of rocks, if dog paddling and inhaling only swallowing amounts of water is swimming.
Standing just a few feet above the surface, what had seemed like a small hop when viewed from the other side of the river, now felt like a death jump. Your father treaded water below, waiting and encouraging.
You are not the type of person the jumps off a rock into a body of water. When you enter the river, in fact, it is done by dipping in a toe, then testing an ankle, and then, perhaps experimenting with a knee. Each step requires its moment of acclimation, sometimes followed by a retreat and reassessment.
Yet on this day, the death grip of anxiety that so often suffocates your mind has dampened. There would be no retreat.
You jumped.
The heart-grasping shock of water. Your father’s sure hands. Coughing like a chain smoker as water burned your lungs. The exhilaration of having taken the leap these are memories that will never leave you.
But for most of your life, you won’t jump. You will be inconspicuously polit. You will speak only after layers of thought, after rehearsing what you’ll say, and after planning responses to potential questions. The politeness of small talk will elude you. Your pleasantries will be stiff.
You will compensate for this anxiety by hyper-focusing on independence. In other words, you never ask for help.
The months before you turn 18, you will move a four-hour drive away from your hometown. You will get an apartment, find a job — two actually— and enroll in community college.
But what you think of as eagerness for independence and maturity, this desire you have to leave your childhood behind, is actually impatience, which is one of your most childish qualities. It will be years before you realize this.
The classroom is always an easy place for you, so college seemed like the natural next step in your life. When other students wavered, you never hesitated. School was breeze that barely brushed you on your way by.
In college, however, you will struggle for the first time. The classes require more. And the truth is that you don’t know how to study. You have never had to develop study habits.
Doing well in school part of your identity and the idea of failing is overwhelming. You quit rather than try, while dodging the numerous tutors and study groups that are available. The risk of failure is too great to bear, and the only thing worse than failure, in your mind, is ask for help.
When you are in your twenties, you will love someone and she will never know. You will meet at work. You will quickly come to treasure her radiant smiles in the smoldering fire that is tangles of her red hair. You will love how graciously she makes conversations include you, in a way that eases your anxiety social situations. She is the type of gregarious person that has gravity — if you come too close, she will pull you into her world to live as an extrovert until she lets you go.
Once after a day, when the sun was low and shadows were long, you will find yourself watching her work. She was cleaning a countertop and had not noticed you yet. The light made gold rivets in her red tangles.
You could feel your courage growing as you rehearsed the conversation you hope to have.
Then you realize she saw your shadow on the floor when you approached. sShe knows you are standing there.
Maybe it was regret of being seen too early, your lack of courage being known, or the unwillingness to risk and perhaps fail, but a tightly knit cage of anxiety clung around your heart and you retreated to awkward small talk that not even the gravity of her spirit could ease.
The moment passed. Later as you played this failure in your mind, you realized that she wanted you to love her and would mistake your hesitance for lack of interest.
You will work at the same job for the next three years, because that is where she works and you hope to manufacture another moment like the one you fumbled. You will fit snugly together as friends, sharing parts of your lives, yet never the whole. Your other friends will prod you, though you deny your feelings when they ask. To admit them would make your failures known, and worse, they might try to help.
But there will never be another moment.
For most of your life you will ruminate on the moments you have missed.
People you know and love will pass away, and you will feel the burden of things unsaid and time misspent.
People will treat you unfairly, and you will carry the weight of injustice as if it makes you stronger, rather than speaking up and letting go.
You will treat people unfairly, but you will rationalize rather than recognize. Apologies make you self-conscious, and it is easier to place blame than to accept it. You will regret the moments when you did not apologize but should have.
It goes without saying there are moments in your life I would change, first among them is the decision that sent you to prison. But I’m not sure it would work that way, that I could pick a single moment and remove it and somehow prevent that event from occurring in the future.
So instead I offer a small pebbles tossed into the pond in which we swim, in hopes that they might ripple through the waters of time, influencing your life at the right moments.
The first Pebble: just jump. You will be happier for it.
And the second: if you find you cannot jump, remember that one of the reasons your feet left the rock was that your father was treading water below. It’s OK to have help. | PL