Choose Life

- Natasha Bird

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, off the-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.