I’ve been chewing on this idea of the bridge for a while now. Everyone—I mean everyone—uses it as this mushy metaphor for bringing things together. Connection. Partnership. Building understanding. That whole deal. But that never sat right with me, not after what I went through a few years back.
My own practice with the “bridge” didn’t start with wanting to reach someone. It started with needing to get the hell away.
The Concrete Mixer Phase
I was working a job that was the envy of my college buddies. Big office, big title, money coming in steady. I had the whole setup. A house, a lease, a routine you could set a clock to. It was safe. It was easy. And honestly, it was slowly killing my brain cells. I was a well-paid ghost just going through the motions. The whole city I was in started feeling less like home and more like a high-end, comfortable cage. I needed out. I needed a gap. Not a link.
The practice started with a sudden, ugly thought: I need to burn this down and walk across the ashes. That’s probably too dramatic, but that’s exactly how it felt inside. I looked at my life and saw this massive, wide river between where I was and where I wanted to be. And the first impulse wasn’t to find a ferry or a friend to help me across. It was to build a structure so solid, so heavy, that it would permanently separate me from the bank I was standing on.
This wasn’t a subtle move. I literally pulled the plug on everything.
- First, the job. Sent a one-line email to the VP: I resign. Effective immediately.
- Next, the house. Dumped the lease, sold ninety percent of what I owned on a garage sale weekend. Didn’t care about the price, just needed it gone fast.
- Third, I broke ties with the routine. Stopped answering the usual phone calls, changed my number, and blocked the neighborhood group chat. I was severing connections, not making them.
The whole process took six weeks. Six weeks of deliberate, focused disconnection. People kept asking me where I was going, what new opportunity I had lined up. They thought I was crossing the bridge to a promotion or a new city with a better salary. I just smiled, shrugged, and said I was going nowhere in particular.
Walking the Void
That bridge I built? It was empty. I packed the rest of my life—a couple of suitcases and a guitar—into my truck and just drove. I drove east until the road ran out at the ocean. I didn’t check hotel reviews. I didn’t book anything ahead of time. I just aimed for the edge and landed in a small, sleepy town that was the polar opposite of the skyscraper jungle I’d left behind.
I rented a tiny apartment above a failing laundromat. The first three months were brutal. There was no net. No familiar faces. No immediate career path. I’d successfully crossed my bridge, but all that awaited me was silence and uncertainty. This was not a comfortable connection. It was a massive, isolating void.
That’s when the shift happened. I realized the true value of that structure I’d built. The bridge wasn’t there to connect me to this new place; it was there to hold the vast, necessary distance between me and the old one. It was a physical representation of my own severance. It was a tool of separation.
For the first time in ten years, I felt completely free, precisely because I was disconnected. That bridge created the void, the space, the emptiness that I needed to actually figure out what the hell to do next. It wasn’t about linking A to B. It was about creating a definitive, uncrossable boundary back to A so that B could finally have room to breathe and become something new.
The whole point of the bridge, for me, wasn’t connection. It was the power of the clean break. It was the absolute, final declaration that I was done with the past. And without that harsh separation, the quiet life I have now, the real growth, it never would have happened.
