choose life
Natasha Bird has always opted for the path less travelled – her impulsive adventures a positive reminder that she’s in charge of her own destiny. Now dangerously close to contented stability, she’s sizing up her biggest leap of faith yet
After a lifetime of handbrake turns, this writer is now contemplating a more settled existence.
If all your friends stayed on the bridge, would you jump off? That’s not how the saying goes, is it? And yet somehow, at the age of 23 – when almost everyone I knew was embarking on a post-graduate degree or settling into their first secure job after university – I found myself sitting alone, in the dark, on the edge of a bed in a Best Western hotel in Bahrain, facing the breathtaking consequences of the latest in a series of mad, offthe-bridge leaps that had punctuated my life.
In this instance, it was the overnight ditching of my comfortable life in London for a stint running a women’s magazine, dabbling in foreign correspondence and facing near-deportation, in a troubled corner of the Middle East. It was just one of my many nutty impulses that have also included running away to France, aged 18, to live a solitary – at times, seriously lonely – existence in a weird attic conversion above a deaf elderly couple and, at age 26, abandoning my charming (and understandably quite startled) American fiancé in Tennessee, along with the future we’d started to plan in detail, to start my adult life again from scratch in London, roughly 6,500km away from him. In the moment, I didn’t think much of these things. I don’t regret any of them, but I’m occasionally caught out much later by a sudden penny-drop recognition of who I might have hurt or what I’ve left behind.
Pressure from our peers usually pulls us into recognisable patterns of decision making. From teenage rites of passage, such as taking a first puff on a spliff, to settling on a career path and choosing the right job later in life, most of our big choices are influenced by whether or not our friends, family, peers or people we admire have done something similar. This is mostly true of my day-to-day life. I really sweat the small stuff, as I like to feel that everything is in order and that I have direction in relation to what other people are doing around me. I work overtime because my parents taught me to value my grades over adventure. I get teased about my history of “take home to your mum” cookie-cutter boyfriends because I care too much about ticking the right boxes for my future. I read the books everyone is talking about and go to the shows featured in ELLE in a concerted attempt to always be tapped into the zeitgeist. And I drink matcha tea and queue up daily for the squat rack, because my fitness pals have told me these things will contribute to my long-term wellbeing. But then, every few years, I succumb to a sudden urge to make a change that seems as left-field as it is irreversibly life altering. I’ve reached a point where I need to ask myself why.
I spoke to a psychiatrist about it, a friend of my father’s. First off, he laughed at me for trying to get to the bottom of my own psyche. Apparently that’s not something you can just do, even if you need to for an article. It’s why psychiatrists have to have their own shrinks. But he went on to give his two cents on the matter, saying, “You know, you and your dad are the only two people who’ve ever told me they regularly struggle with how to feel alive.”
This struck a sour note, because my dad is a melancholy sort of man, who seems often in futile pursuit of extra meaning. My moments of wild abandon may indeed make
“EVERY TIME I CAUSE ONE OF THESE GIANT DISRUPTIONS, IT REFRESHES THE SENSE THAT I’M IN CONTROL OF MY FUTURE”
sense in this context. I certainly have tussled with that sticky, dark pull that both roots you to the spot and tugs at your sense of order when your brain isn’t quite coping. “There is a strong relationship between depression and high-risk behaviours,” says Pamela Cantor, a psychologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. “People who suffer deep lows often seek highs – the dopamine rush of a bungee-jump, the excitement and release of a risky sexual liaison.” Thus, the adrenaline provides a momentary, thrilling break from an otherwise unsatisfying reality.
While I might have inherited a little of my dad’s sadness, I don’t think it’s at the crux of what’s going on. I’m not looking for a near-death experience to remind me I want to be alive. The plunges I take go beyond the momentary adrenaline fix. Unlike bungee-jumping, where you dip briefly into the abyss only to hurtle back out again 10 seconds later, most of my jumps have left me facing a much more lingering and scary unknown. Throwing everything up in the air isn’t about wanting to live so much as wanting to be actively engaged in the proceedings of my life – to remind myself that I have enormous agency over my own existence, that I don’t have to sleepwalk down a road that others, like zombies, have unthinkingly trampled before me.
There are, of course, sad consequences of my behaviour. For every drastic whim, there’s been a boyfriend left behind, dismayed at his own lack of say in the matter, and a mum on the end of the phone whose voice cracks as she pretends to be totally fine with what I’ve just done. It’s not that I haven’t cared about other people. I’ve reflected on how they might have felt, retrospectively. But had I always forced myself to absorb everyone else’s disquiet in the moment, my life would have taken on a wholly different shape. By their very motivation, these were decisions that had to be selfishly made. Every time I cause one of these giant disruptions, it refreshes the sense that I, alone, am in control of my future. Nothing is predetermined, there is no fate and no destiny. I act autonomously. Every choice is mine to make, so heck, I’m going to make some really big ones and see what happens next. I may have left a few casualties in my wake, but I approach these moments with the optimism that, once I’ve made that screeching handbrake turn, it will all work out. It may even open a doorway into something exciting and fulfilling.
And mostly they have. France was a strange excursion; I spent my time as an attic-dweller feeling glum and scrawling letters home to my long-suffering sister. But it saved me from a year of full-moon parties with the other gap-year pirates. The Middle East, where I threw myself into fighting the patriarchy, the status quo and, quite regularly, my bemused male bosses, became two of my most defining, scary, wonderful years so far. As for leaving my fiancé, I’m still regularly plagued by that one in my lonelier moments, but I wouldn’t have my role as a digital editor if I hadn’t done it.
While my approach might be a touch extreme – you don’t have to flee to politically unstable countries to remind yourself of your choices – I suspect it’s something a few women may relate to. Culturally, life has opened up a bit for us. In theory, religion doesn’t have to govern our morals anymore, men and Mother Nature don’t have such dominion over our bodies and, thanks to feminism, we can now be anything we bloody well want to be. More and more, we’re able to feel like we don’t have to answer to anyone but ourselves. But this heaps on a colossal pressure to take advantage of our options, to do something special. As Barry Schwartz says in The Paradox Of
Choice, “The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. There is a cost to having an overload of choice.” And the cost is that it can be a bit paralysing.
And this is where I presently find myself: a bit paralysed. My latest stab at rebellion has gone hilariously wrong – the bad biker boy (aka noncookie-cutter boyfriend) I’ve picked up has turned out to be a nice bloke after a serious relationship. I’ve been in the same house with the same three delightful friends for a year, longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere, and I’m happily settled into a job I love. I’m dangerously close to the path well trodden and thus overdue for a shift. Yet, somehow, this time it feels like I might have a lot more to lose.
It was put to me that perhaps the biggest leap someone like me could take right now would be to make the choice to hold fast. To find a way to use my frequently wielded agency to overcome the restlessness, to be confident that my current situation is a state of my own creation. But while I continue to have enough optimism to know that I’ll be fine if I decide to stay the course, I’m just not sure I’m ready to remain on the bridge.