Dying to my old self

I was thirty-four and I had been putting this off for a year. Not because I did not believe it. Because I did not want a room full of people looking at me while I admitted something.

I am not a person who does things in front of people. I do things quietly and then tell you about them afterwards, if at all.

I spent a year deciding and about four seconds doing it.

The part nobody warns you about is that the water is not the hard part. The hard part happened months earlier, on an ordinary Tuesday, when I finally stopped arguing with God about something I had been arguing about since I was nineteen. Nobody saw that. There was no tank and no lights and nobody clapped.

By the time I got in the water it was already true. I was just saying it out loud where people could see.

Somebody explained to me later that the old language for this is dying to your old self. I would have rolled my eyes at that a few years ago. Now it is the only phrase that fits — there is a version of me that does not exist anymore, and I do not miss her.

I came up and put my hands over my face, which was not planned, and I stayed like that for a second longer than I meant to. Somebody handed me a towel. My friend was crying, which I gave her a hard time about later.

I had also assumed everyone would be looking at my arm. I have a tattoo that took eleven hours and covers a decade I am not proud of. Nobody said a word about it, then or since — except one woman who told me she liked it, and that was the entire conversation.

That is the thing I would tell somebody still deciding. You are not walking into a room that is going to inspect you. You are walking into water in front of people who already decided they were glad you came.