Rough Script of an NPR MOTH Story- Bridge Jump
In high school I had a pretty skewed idea of what it meant to be a woman. I wore a lot of makeup and cared about appearance… I knew judgmental women and was beaten into submission, I felt like I had to be a certain way and fit into a mold to be acceptable. I remember being told by friends when I was 14 or 15 that I should be wearing darker makeup and commenting on what and how much I ate at the lunch table … **These were the years where Netflix became popular and all the 2000s TV shows were available for streaming… and if you’ve noticed in all 2000s TV shows women are always beautiful and perfect and sexualized, it felt like women were always portrayed as like perfect and as love interests for men, or they were total judgmental snakes. Definitely toxic content for an adolescent girl, but these were my on-screen role models. I became a product of unrealistic societal expectations. I was miserable
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When I got to college I had a total revolution of the self. I decided to follow my interest in the outdoors by signing up for a hiking program the week before school started. I felt so free that whole week, I was able to be myself and leave behind my high school self. ***On our way home from the White Mountains that week, the first time I saw myself in the reflection of a shop window, I remember thinking that I didn’t even recognize the person staring back at me, covered in sweat and dirt. I looked and felt more alive than I had in years. This was who I wanted to be for the rest of my life.
This hiking program was also where I met friends who shared loves of outdoors and endurance activities… and they were boys. They were everything I wanted to be … they ate like animals, ran down rocky mountain sides, laughed openly and at everything… they were everything that was different than the person I thought I had to be in high school. And they accepted me. Four of these boys quickly became some of my closest friends during my first semester of college.
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One day, some of these friends of mine were like “let’s do this long run and bridge jump”… These guys were always up to stuff like this… they were adrenaline seekers, and they liked to push their own physical limits to feel alive. I had a taste of this during our week together before college started, and I wanted to chase this feeling that they all seemed to crave- a feeling of freedom. I wanted so badly to show them that I was as courageous and as strong as they all were. I told them that I was in. I was intimidated and slightly horrified, I had only just started to get into long distance running and had never bridge-jumped before, but I really wanted to keep up with them and prove my manliness, for lack of a better term.
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So we met at the dining hall one hot Wednesday afternoon in late-August, and headed out. We just kept running faster and faster and faster and I was dying a little bit because they were all built a little leaner, faster, stronger, bigger than me and I was like sprinting to keep up… and if you know what that feels like, it’s not pretty. Everything hurt, but my ego was not going to let me back down. I ached to be a part of the pack without any kind of accommodations or adjustments on the part of my new friends. I wanted to fit in naturally. They kept looking back to check in on me, and I’d give them a quick thumbs up, but as soon as they would look away, I would continue what I like to refer to as ugly-running… when you don’t hide the pain in your face and sweat is just pouring down your face and you’re beat red and your breathing is choppy… but after 4-4.5 long miles, we finally made it to the Trestle Train bridge that overlooked the Lamprey River.
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The bridge looked a lot scarier in person than the way I imagined it. It was this gross reddish-rusty color, and it was covered in graffiti done in poor-taste… I don’t remember much of what the graffiti said, but in the moment I imagined it as warnings to turn around, and not to jump. I remembered when I looked down from the edge, it seemed like the drop was a mile-long (it was thirty-feet, which is not THAT high)… but in the moment I first peered over the edge I remembered that I was afraid of heights, unknown bodies of water, the feeling of falling, and people watching me… But it was too late to back down. I felt like I had to do it.
I had to take my baggy running clothes off so I wouldn’t be as weighed down in the water, and so I wouldn’t have to run home in wet stuff, which made me feel very vulnerable and feminine in front of my friends... I’m not sure if the other boys really noticed, I was one of them after all, not a regular girl… but I definitely felt acutely aware of my girl-ness in that moment. First three boys started jumping and my friend Will asked me if I wanted to go.
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I was standing there and I kept counting myself off over and over again… but I couldn’t do it. Three, two, one… and I’d bend my knees and prepare to launch, but couldn’t get myself to actually do it. I felt like I was in the in-between between who I was in high school and who I wanted to be and where I fit in. If I jumped I would be one of the boys. I was hanging in between these two versions of myself.
3,2,1… jump 3,2,1… jump 3,2,1… jump… Ten minutes had passed and everyone just wanted to get out of the water and go home for dinner… but I refused to back down. I just stood on the edge of that bridge and everything else seemed to disappear. It was me, the bridge, thirty feet of space, and the water. No one and nothing else. I kept counting and counting, starting to doubt if I would ever actually pull the trigger, but then all of a sudden I bent my knees and just like accidentally jumped… and I was plummeting through the air towards the water and I was so surprised that I actually jumped that I screamed and then inhaled as I hit the water.
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Finally, I made my way off to the side and I was like gasping for air and I was a mess and my friends were like kind of concerned I think, but I was okay!!
We dressed back up and ran home, all of us riding an adrenaline high and celebrating as we made our way back to the dining hall for a celebratory dinner…. I was so exhausted… I felt like I was coming down from a major high and all of a sudden I could just feel how heavy and tired my body was. I felt like lead.
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When we finally made it back and stopped for dinner at the dining hall, we all were kind of bragging about the adventure and making it sound like a lot bigger of a deal than it actually was. Honestly, I barely survived I think, because my body was toast, I was exhausted, and we were still soaked and freezing sitting in the dining hall from our swim, which literally sent me to the ER that weekend because I contracted a UTI. But, I knew that that day I became one of the boys. All of the pain and suffering and illegalities were worth it! At least this is what I told myself for a few weeks… The person I was in high school was gone. I’d made the decision to jump, to leave behind who I was, to become this perfect, unfeminine version of myself… but at the cost of crossing my own comfort zone lines… ignoring where my body was telling me to stop, to breather, to put myself and my health first… I had achieved this goal of fitting in, but I’d lost my own self-respect along the way.
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It’s funny to look back at that time in my life 3.5 years ago where I thought that I was becoming the best version of myself. Now it’s almost kind of a sad memory to me because all I can think about is that one saying “if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” and I am the kind of person who would jump in right after them, risking my health and wellbeing for the sake of fitting in.
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That day that I tried to jump to prove that I was a part of something… that I belonged to and could keep up with this gang of boys. I was in a weird proving game… a game that I was never going to win. It was made for me to fail.
Being a girl is kind of like that… you’re made to believe all of these negative things about different ways that women express themselves, you hear things like “women are judgmental, shallow, etc.”… that was horrible language for me to hear growing up as a woman because it made me feel like I had to be “more manly” to get away from that stigma.
When I look back on the day I jumped off of the bridge, it makes me sad to see how much I struggled with my own identity as female throughout most of my adolescence, but I know that I am not the only girl who has struggled to try to cover up their female-ness in order to feel successful or worthy compared to men.
This is incredibly poignant, and I did not anticipate where it was heading until the very end. Really well written--thank you for letting us into your thoughts. From, Kate
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