A Shark, a Latte, and a Road I’ve Taken

I’m standing on the roof of the Argo, staring down at the seemingly bottomless green depths of Somes Sound, trying to decide when I’m going to jump. It’s definitely frigid (62 degrees, at the most: this is a fact), and the seal we saw a few minutes ago could theoretically have drawn a shark to the vicinity (this is speculation, and almost certainly untrue). What do I get for jumping? My cousins will think I’m cool, and I can say that I’ve done it, and one of them will take a video so that I can prove to the world that I fear nothing, sharks and hypothermia be damned. But that’s when I jump, and even though the if has gone away (I have too much pride to climb off the roof), I haven’t quite gotten around to it. Instead, as I stare into freezing, (possibly) shark-infested waters, all that comes to mind is “well, if I do die, I won’t have to make a decision about graduate school.”

As a word of helpful advice: if swimming with sharks in murky water sounds preferrable to starting graduate school, it’s time to rethink the choice to do that program. I had my sights set on this program from my first day of undergrad — really, from the moment I applied to Clemson. It had been my primary goal, even as I realized over semesters of practicums and student teaching that it really was not what I wanted to do. And, because I’m somebody who tends to stick with what they’ve set out to do, I refused to let myself consider any other possibility for my future, even as that path diverted further and further from what I feel I am meant to do, even as I felt myself slowly collapsing in from the pressure and lack of passion towards this step that would funnel me into a ready-made career that I no longer wanted. Leaving the program, on the other hand, would feel like a failure. It would be awkward, maybe embarrassing. It means disappointing some people, changing the entire future I had been trucking towards, and starting from scratch with a new dream. In other words, not something to be taken lightly, and a decision that had to be made, sooner rather than later.

Just like that, I’m in the water.

When Frodo and his friends set off from the Shire, Frodo recounts Bilbo’s belief, “there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door…You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to” (Tolkien 82). “The Road Goes On,” a quote lifted from one of Bilbo’s songs in writing and from this quote in spirit, is engraved on the inside of my class ring from Clemson. I picked the inscription in January 2021, when I hadn’t committed to any master’s program, when I still imagined myself as a teacher, when I was reeling from two breakups (one Decision making one, and another one, smaller, but still painful) and just foraying into what would be over a year of genuinely soul-crushing depression.

I picked this quote because I find the idea of the Road very comforting, even when I’m not entirely convinced what deity has laid it out for me. I do believe that there is something that I am meant to be doing, something that I have been especially designed for, something that will make me feel alive, free, and whole. If it also happens to be something that I can make a living doing, that would be fantastic, but it’s not required. What I do require is that my job is not something I dread, and that my career is not something that I feel sick to my stomach when I imagine doing for a year, let alone a life. I could keep myself at the “home” of this scenario for a while, stuff down the call that I feel outside of my personal Shire, but that doesn’t really seem to work, once you’ve gotten that taste of what life can be. Frodo spends a long time, waiting to be ready to leave the Shire, but he knows that he won’t stay there forever. I know, just as firmly, that I can’t avoid ending up on the Road once I’ve taken a step on it. The problem is that taking that step feels a bit like jumping into freezing, potentially-shark-infested waters, especially if you forget everything that’s built up to the one single moment.

This fork in the Road has been slowly approaching for months — I can see that now. It really started last August, when I felt stir-crazy and wanted to travel, and asked my cousin if I could visit her family in Boston during fall break. I wasn’t at my best during that weekend. I slept for hours, procrastinated an essay to a painful point, caught a bad cold, and got the sense that this was where I was supposed to be. From then on, my sights shifted to New England. When I graduated, when I got my master’s, I would move there, just not yet. Bilbo says something else to Gandalf about Frodo. “He’s still in love with the Shire,” Bilbo says, and Gandalf agrees, but they both know that the Road will call Frodo eventually, and that he will not be able to stay where he has always been. I don’t imagine my Shire as a physical place. I don’t have a “home” that I go back to in my hometown, and my apartment in Clemson feels like a college apartment. Because of that, I think that my Shire is more of a state of mind — the easy, traditionally people-pleasing path of life. I can get a degree in a field where I can find a job, whether I want it or not. I find a nice place in the South to settle down, I stick to what will be a challenging, but not very adventurous career. There won’t be many risks, and I will be happy. Happy, but not as happy as I could be, and I think that’s the real thing driving me to this crossroads. I know that there is something more for me. I feel a yearning beyond something I can describe, and I must chase it. When my cousin offered me a summer job doing childcare for her two kids, it took only a couple hours for me to tell her yes. And from there? Well, you already know that I ended up on the roof of a boat in Maine.

The Days When Decisions Happen are not the most dramatic days- so I didn’t climb out of the water, towel off, and immediately send an email dropping out of graduate school and text my landlord to start negotiating out of my lease. I might be dramatic, but I’m not that dramatic, and that would have felt so contrived. Instead, I ate a deviled egg and a cucumber cracker, sat in the sun until the chill was gone, and finally admitted to my cousin that I didn’t want to get this master’s in teaching, but that I was going to do it anyway, since it was what I had said I was going to do.

No, Decision Day feels like a normal Friday, after the rush of the trip to Maine is over and done, when I’ve finished out the week by putting in some hours babysitting. This Day doesn’t feel monumental. It’s a morning where waking up is a drag- a slow, torturous process that begins with the first alarm at 7, and continues through all the others puncturing through the haze of waking up until I finally deposit myself on the kitchen floor at 8am, ready to smile and say “good morning” and make Cream of Wheat and oatmeal in separate pots for the kids while I swallow down cold brew as fast as you can, hoping that it brings something that feels like “being alive” into my body. It doesn’t. Instead, I’m sluggish the whole morning, disassociated and grumpy at the park, irritated and trying to hide it during lunch, when all I really want to be doing is reading East of Eden at a coffeeshop, without anybody interrupting me for at least 20 minutes. East of Eden, depending on how you look at it, is the best and worst book to be reading when you’re making a decision of this magnitude. If you’re looking for the easy path, it’s not going to give it to you. You’re responsible for yourself, full stop. There is no family destiny that you can blame, no fault in your stars or passing of the buck. It got uncomfortable, so naturally, I stopped reading and played a crossword on my phone instead. I wasn’t going to face the fact that I wanted to drop out, thank you very much.

I don’t ask other people to make decisions for me, nor do I want them to (see the earlier impact of East of Eden), but I have been known to feel out the opinions of others to push myself towards a choice. When I floated the idea of quitting the master’s program with one of my high school friends, she asked what was keeping me from doing it. My list (possibly disappointing people, breaking my lease, missing my friends) felt instantly inadequate. None of those were good enough reasons to ignore what I was more and more convinced I needed to do. My sister Maddie, who has always been my guide when it comes to making tough decisions, made it simple.

“Is this what your gut is telling you? I would listen to it”

I looked up, turned to Catherine, and said, “I’m going to withdraw,” and immediately started crying. I had jumped off the boat, chosen to continue along the Road, and that was that. I drank the rest of my vanilla latte, opened Indeed, and began drafting an email to the director of my graduate school program.

I didn’t wake up on that Friday planning to drop out of graduate school, uproot my life, and begin the process of putting it back together 1000 miles away. If I’m honest, I don’t know if I really expected to find it in me to withdraw at all, bad gut feeling notwithstanding, but that, of course, is what I have been building towards, the cataclysmic decision that (hopefully) has a happy ending somewhere in the future. I’m not going to be going to Clemson in the fall. I’m not going to get my Master of Arts in Teaching. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, only that I’m going to forge ahead, and that I’m going to write about it. This is the most terrifying and exhilarating thing I’ve ever done, and I don’t want to forget how it feels. Right now, I mostly feel a lot like Bilbo Baggins a la Martin Freeman, sprinting down the Road away from the Shire, with nothing to say but that “I’m going on an adventure.”