We are at the Parkwood house. The walls in each room are lined with stuff that needs to be donated or thrown into a dumpster. My husband informs me that his parents, his sister and her whole family are coming in a couple of days. I am freaking out about cleaning the house and getting rid of all the trash and junk before they get here.

My husband, Drew, is furiously writing code in the linoleum-floored room next to the laundry room. I keep bugging him: “Can’t you just help me for ten minutes? I have a fuckload of stuff to do before they get here!”.

Apparently, the plan is to jump off our back deck, swim in the ocean to a tiny island, hike through the island, jump back into the ocean on the backside to go swim to another island. All of this with two septuagenarians, a toddler, two little girls under 10 and four adults who can swim ok, but nowhere near lifeguard status swimmers. 

The Parkwood house was located in a southern, suburban neighborhood full of 1960’s brick ranches and no bodies of water for four blocks… so already, the location and surroundings weren’t ideal for “jumping into the ocean” with the whole family.

If I were to get past this, and play along, several other concerns came to mind. If we were going to hike around the two islands, wouldn’t we want shoes? So we don’t cut our feet on sticks? Or step on a bee or wasp? 

At minimum, we’ll all need to be wearing flip flops. But you can’t swim in the ocean with flip flops. Which brings up the possibility of a couple of us wearing a backpack to carry all the flip flops for the swimming portions of our family adventure. Would 9 pairs of flip flops fit in a single backpack? Would the backpacks need to be waterproof?

Let’s also address the elephant in the room. What about the sharks? I find myself screaming to my husband: “I’m not going swimming in the ocean at night! That’s when the sharks are out to feed!”

I woke up, excited, bewildered, a little stressed out.

As I lay there, trying to figure out what the hell that was all about, the answer hit me in the face.

This is an adventure! Stop trying to poke holes in it. You can’t anticipate what will go wrong, just as you can’t see how incredibly fun it might turn out to be.

This is how I used to feel about swimming. I fell off a ferry boat in Lake Michigan when I was 5, and was terrified of large bodies of water… 

Until I found myself blowing bubbles under the water one Saturday morning during the adult swim lessons I forced myself to sign up for. My husband was taking me to Jamaica for my 30th birthday, and I was not about to limit my vacation fun to the infinity pool and the private beach in front of the resort.

Being embarrassed about blowing bubbles with other people in their 30s and 40s turned into me learning how to freestyle swim, which turned into me swimming laps three times a week and loving it, which ultimately led to me jumping off a glass-bottom boat in 80ft of choppy Atlantic Ocean. 

This was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done. I thought I was going to pass out from the sheer terror I experienced in the first couple minutes of swimming, breathing into my snorkel like a paperbag, getting hit in the face by the waves, getting water in my mask, losing sight of my husband and our guide for a half a second…

Until I forced myself to breathe into it, and relax. My whole body flattened and stopped trying to fight the waves. The hardest thing I learned in my swim classes was this: if I allowed myself to relax and look straight down, then my body would stay on the surface.

I took a deep breath and looked down into the sea, and gazed upon the magical underwater city that lay below me. 60-80 feet of stunning towers of coral reef, tropical fish in every color of the rainbow. Amazement and wonder immediately washed away the fear and anxiety. I was too stunned by the expansive beauty and mystery of the underwater city to be scared.

When I climbed out of the ocean and got back on that little boat, I was a different person. That experience completely changed the course of my life. I thought: “What else have I been afraid of? What if it turns out to be something awesome and magical?”. 

I proceeded to try and succeed at many things that had previously scared the shit out of me: going back to school, and graduating with three diplomas, starting my own consulting firm, serving dozens of clients, learning how to do almost everything under the digital marketing umbrella, embracing my identity as an entrepreneur.

This is how I’ve been feeling about writing (and sharing that writing, instead of keeping it all to myself). I have felt beyond terrified, more like phobic, of the idea of becoming a writer. The real terror lies in publishing something when someone, somewhere, might happen upon it and (eeeeeeeeek!!!!!) read it, maybe have some thoughts and feelings about it.

I believe my dream about the fantastical family water adventure was really an analogy crafted by my highest self, in an attempt to show me how ridiculous it is to worry about flip flops (and even sharks) should you be invited to go island-hopping with your family. 

How many people do YOU know who’ve gotten to do this?? Maybe a friend of a friend of a cousin may have once mentioned the idea, but probably not.

My point is this: the thing that scares the shit out of you has the possibility to be one of the greatest adventures of your life. So fuck the flip flops, and jump in. The water is warm.