It’s normal to be scared of doing new things. Human history is littered with evidence of the danger of trying. Think of how many suffered while unlocking how to eat an artichoke. I choose that example because many more important breakthroughs involve body horror beyond comprehension. We try and try and try and have tried, long before any kind of safety regulations were put in place. That’s how we discover.
In my time writing this Substack, I obviously have tried many new things That was the point. None of them were that alarming, because I’m not a naturally brave person. While we’ve established that fear is necessary because danger is real, it’s hard not to put judgment on being afraid. Will I never be brave? Am I not able to overcome my lizard brain and rise, lofty and powerful, above its pathetic terror? Will I ever truly live? Big questions that I frequently put upon small things. Smaller even than the artichoke.
It has taken me a long time to do 39 new things. This is my official 39th entry, coming years after I began this project. I believe I reached 39 things pretty quickly, but thinking about and writing about them was far more demanding. And many of the new things were either too small or simply paid for with money, which sort of underlined how much is available to us only via cashflow. That stymied me a bit. Yet here we are!
I am not a scientist. Nothing about this experiment proves anything. I can’t say it has made me a better person, though I hope I am. Maybe I’m worse. You can decide after reading this last new thing I did: riding a jet ski. It was the first New Things that really, really scared me.
Riding a jet ski was something I agreed to do, with many caveats. I did not want to do it at all. Shooting through space at a high speed on a vehicle that can easily turn over, blast air up your asshole to explode your intestines or shatter your spine, is not something I was excited about. I am trying to be conscientious about how to frame this story, because it involves a long time friend, someone I would have considered amongst my closest friends, who utterly betrayed me with this jet ski. The jet ski was part of a film shoot. He wanted to film something on the jet ski which would star me, which is a flattering ask. I love to act. I love to be asked to act. I love to be trusted with other people’s work. I hate the jet ski.
Our communication around planning this shoot was an absolute disaster. I don’t know what his perception of it was, but I do truly believe I made two things clear: One, I will absolutely not go fast or far on the jet ski. Two, he was completely welcome to film the short with someone else. Either someone brave or someone not afraid of jet skis. I thought the first condition was agreed upon and the second dismissed. He wanted to do it together. Okay.
The end result was a fight in the middle of the ocean, during which I cried. Hysterically. Genuinely. My body could not do what he wanted to do, which was travel for thirty minutes to a distant pier with the engine wide open. By 15mph, I was shaking in terror and the jet ski can go much, much faster than that. It would have to, if we were to get to the pier he’d planned on. Again, a plan I completely misunderstood or did not have clearly explained to me, depending on your perspective. His or mine.
Listen. I have tried so hard over the years to have the approach adolescent boys do to their bodily integrity. Try anything! Fly in the air! Ride an office chair down a highway with a pot on your head and roller skates on your hands! What’s the worst that can happen!
No. We are all born under different stars. Maybe it’s the gendered socialization that teaches young girls that their physical form is under constant attack. Maybe I’m particularly clumsy and a dweeb. But anytime I risk, I pay. I fall on my tailbone on the ice, I catch my finger in the door, I twist my knee running across the grass. As a result, I’m always considering how I move through space, how each step runs up my leg to my pelvis and back, how my arms swing and balance me, how my head turns on its swivel. Carelessness has a price. I am pretty sure that a long ride on the jet ski at 60mph would have cost a lot.
It’s also just a personal policy I have — and I know this will be controversial — that I never ever want to do something dangerous that a man has suggested.
Maybe one day I’ll write a play about the fight we had on that jet ski, floating together in matching wet suits and goggles as a police officer yelled at us through a bullhorn to get away from the shore. I’ll withhold most of the details now even though I don’t think he will read this. Every relationship has points of strain, the joints that are worked too hard over the years, perhaps never fully recovered. And then one day—POP! It goes. And it never moves the same again.
My friend and I have often had conflicts over what we expect of one another. Expectations are the great challenge of connection, those spoken and unspoken, and I wanted to be brave enough to live up to his expectations. I also didn’t want to die or become maimed because his expectations were unreasonable and fundamentally stupid. My fear was well-founded, even if nothing too bad would have happened. He had never been on a jet ski either. The pop came for me when he ignored my pleading and went faster. That’s when things really collapsed, emotionally.
Admittedly, my friend had fear too. His fear as a director was that the close-by pier where were bobbing would not allow him to fly a film drone. I insisted that we try or stop what we were doing and go home. This was actually a compromise from when I was crying and shaking. So, we tried.
Though the police were yelling at us to back up at regular intervals for the rest of the shoot, they never noticed the drone or did not care. We filmed and I learned to guide the jet ski in slow (very slow) figure eights at a cop-approved distance from the nearby pier. And my friend faced his other great fear: the ocean. I didn’t know this, but he’d written the script specifically to confront the ocean, even adding a moment where he slides off the back of the jet ski and into the depths. We just weren’t on the same page about this film shoot being exposure therapy.
For the record, I like the ocean. I have a healthy respect for it, but it brings me pleasure to look at it. It brings my friend sick dread. Which is what I feel on a jet ski. Even after I got used to it at a slow speed, it was very loud and threw hard splats of water into my eyes and mouth. This is not how I choose to commune with mother ocean. I am not shredding lines though her belly. I’m playing gently along her edge, like an infant, or making rare forays across her delicate surface in a silent kayak.
The filming finally ended and we made our slow, steady way back past the long jetty and twisting marina. My nervous system was still jangling as I directed the jet ski back onto its trailer. I remained a mess as we arrived at a restaurant for margaritas. I drank two of them and my friend paid.
If there is something I’ve learned about doing new things, it’s that they churn up new knowledge about yourself and other people. I can never go back and not know about that crack in our relationship or that I will cry to get out of jet skiing. Maybe I wouldn’t cry the second time. I’m choosing to not find out.
I wanted my last entry in 39 things to be inspiring and about the power of trying, because it is so so powerful and worthy of our time and energy. It’s the stuff. Do it. Alongside the new things, I will now urge people to embrace the importance of doing the same things. I would have finished these posts much sooner if I’d consistently written every day, for example. I might have gotten braver through repetition and been ready for the jet ski when it arrived. Not sure what I’d have to do to prepare for that mentally, but there must be a way.
On that note, I’ll share that today I went surfing. My very first new thing was about surfing, and here I am, two years later, still fucking awful at it. And I plan to do it again. It is an old thing that still feels new. That may be the most beautiful Thing that there is.
This is my last official entry. Thank you to people who read this blog as I did it, especially because I was so godawful about updating.
My style of writing and thinking isn’t very short-content friendly, it’s kind of millennial-dated personal essay stuff. Since it’s my own blog, I’ve indulged in that.
I do intend to keep doing new things and writing more about them here, until the internet crumbles. I make no money from this and I don’t plan to try to. If you have enjoyed these posts at all, please share, recommend, comment, or like, so they’re circulated. That means a lot to me and is encouraging.
I hope everyone is doing good and doing new things and growing every day. Talk soon ❤️