I did it! After a year of surfing, I finally stood up on the board like I meant it and sailed several waves alllll the way in! I didn't just surf one in, hanging on for dear life, standing up long enough for a still photo to capture the moment. I got up and stayed up! I did it on purpose repeatedly! Amazing! The conditions were perfect: a soft, gray morning with glassy seas; small, mellow, friendly waves, one at a time from one direction, lots of time in between them; calm winds and the girls around to cheer me on. Another great class at Endless Sun Surf School.
And May is our first anniversary! One year ago, we did these classes together and we are still cheering each other on! So beautiful! The girls were absolutely shredding it on Saturday -- everyone caught multiple waves. We even had several party waves -- when more than one person was on a wave at once and sailed straight in together. Shared waves -- shared by agreement. You can't just drop in on someone and yell "Party wave!" to cover your ass -- that's an ethical breach, an interloper crashing someone's wave. A true party wave is communicated -- an invitation and acceptance. Communication, community, communal -- it's a party! The Sisterhood will be having a land-based party to celebrate our first anniversary later this month in addition to our numerous surf sessions. I feel so genuinely lucky to have found this community. It's one thing to stand up; it's another thing to have lovely humans standing up alongside you when you do it.
Surfing "for real" felt like such freedom! After the past few weeks of feeling weighted down, lumbering and clumsy, it felt light. In the past year, I have done the work to get this far. Thanks to good medical care treating my menopause and thyroid issues, I've lost 30 pounds. I have been practicing my pop up on the floor in my apartment leading up to this. In past lessons, Surf Sensei Sean taught me a pop up that has worked. I've been doing some weight lifting, specifically exercises to strengthen my right leg, so it can pull up and through like its supposed to do. I watch clips of people popping up, like from @dronedudeed, like I'm a football player watching film. And recently, I added a visualization to my meditations about feeling free and surfing with ease -- something that's a direct outgrowth of therapy. Getting my mind in a better place has really helped the whole process.
In class on Saturday, after the push into the wave from Chett, awesome instructor and delightful human, I got up right away -- really fast and with purpose, just like I had practiced. The waves were perfect little slow rollers, so very little side-to-side wobbliness. And then I STAYED UP! So exciting! Giggled like a school kid. Honestly prouder of this moment than my PhD. I am 56 years old and I stood up on a surfboard.
And it did take a village -- lots of people on this party wave. Lots of classes, lots of lovely instructors, and lots of support every step of the way from the Surfing Sisterhood. And you know I'll go further to say that the feeling of letting go and allowing -- not worrying so much about getting it perfectly right -- has been supported by both the meditation course and breakthroughs in therapy. The last time I had a good day like this -- the Epic Day -- I had just had a big therapy breakthrough and the conditions on the water were similar. Everything flowed.
And what's weird is I don't really remember what my feet were doing when I got up. I literally can't remember. I just did it. I really wish there was Surfline webcam footage, but there isn't, because we were south of the pier and coverage isn't great. My body just did it, finally! I wonder if this is what it will be like when I no longer feel doubts and fears and the negative thinking fades into the background? Feel a genuine sense of equanimity? No interlopers to interrupt the joy. The party wave atmosphere is allowed to continue uninterrupted; I'm a part of the positive flow. What a huge breakthrough.
Interlopers. Surf Sister Toni had an interaction with an interloper the other day. She saw something that scared her enough to get out of the water for a bit -- perhaps a small thresher shark. There is a submarine canyon a few hundred feet off the Newport Beach Pier. That's why there's such good fishing at that historic pier: big fish sometimes come up from the deep to feed. In the group chat, we dubbed them Canyon Dwellers. Like the mako from a previous post, it is an example we get from time to time of all that can harm us in these waters. The Canyon Dwellers are a newly named precarious reality.
(In googling to learn more about the submarine canyon, I also learned that there is a fish who resides under the pier called a SARCASTIC FRINGEHEAD. So, we have our band name if the sisterhood ever decides to start a band.)
Communities have always been precarious to me. I have often felt isolated and alone, not understood. A wonderful book by Robert Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, talks about the importance of having our emotional lives accurately reflected by others in our communities, especially people who have experienced trauma. That accurate reflection allows us to understand ourselves and our emotions. Inaccurate reflection messes us up for a long time. Stolorow says it's particularly important for those who have experienced trauma to have others who get it, saying there is "the dreadful sense of estrangement and isolation that seems to me to be inherent to the experience of emotional trauma." He shares a quote from a patient of his and his own experience on the matter after he lost his beloved wife, Dede, "One such young man, who had suffered multiple losses of beloved family members during his childhood and adulthood, told me that the world was divided into two groups: the normals and the traumatized ones. There was no possibility, he said, for a normal ever to grasp the experience of a traumatized one. I remembered how important it had been to me to believe that the analyst I saw after Dede’s death was also a person who had known devastating loss, and how I implored her not to say anything that could disabuse me of my belief."
True friends are now of two kinds. The first group are the "in the trenches" people who I've known for some years on a daily basis. Work colleagues, students and residents, lifelong friendships in which we have shown up for each other time after time after time. Trust is built little by little, day by day, in the trenches. There are a few normals here. I recognize them because the conversations are often shallow -- pleasant but shallow. The second group are the traumatized ones. The ones who have known real grief, real loss, real life disaster, and it has softened them, made them more compassionate and genuine. There is an instant connection with these people, a depth that is palpable. Interlopers have entered our mutual lives, we have looked them in the eye, and then got back in the water. We see each other.
The surf girls have those depths. We spoke immediately about being relatively new in town, feeling lonely, and longing for good friends. So, not only do we share a common experience, we have the language, openness, and guts to talk about it with each other. I'm convinced the love of this community helped me feel safe enough to face my own canyon dwellers. As Stolorow wrote in an article, "When my traumatized states could not find a hospitable relational home or context of human understanding, I became deadened, and my world became dulled. When such a home became once again present, I came alive, and the vividness of my world returned."
I've been running for a long time -- nearly 20 years. The shocks kept coming and I kept running. I am grateful for the repetitive conditions of right now that have allowed me to revisit these traumas in order to integrate them. Stolorow again, "Loss—especially traumatic or tragic loss—creates a dark region in our world that will always be there. A wave of profound sadness descends upon us whenever we step into that region of loss. There we are left adrift in a world hollowed out, emptied of light. It is a bleak region that can never be completely eradicated or cordoned off. The injunction to 'let it go and move on' is thus an absurdity. There will always be 'portkeys' back into the darkness—the dark realm in which we need to be emotionally held so that the loss can be better borne and integrated." I now feel held, secure in wavy water, by a number of lovely people who give me buoyancy. "Trauma looms for all of us as an ever-present possibility. I have long contended that the mangling and the darkness can be enduringly borne, not in solitude, but in relationships of deep emotional understanding. In such relationships, we do not encourage the traumatized person to 'get over it and move on.' Instead, we dwell with him or her in his or her endlessly recurring emotional pain, so that he or she is not left unbearably alone in it," Stolorow wrote. I no longer feel alone. No need to run from my darkness, my canyon dwellers.
More big therapy breakthroughs exist in parallel with the surfing breakthrough. I think I have a really good understanding of my buttons now, my triggers, and can be better aware of them and how they work. (Well, some of them anyway.) First, for me, mistakes are treacherous like a thresher. Anytime I perceive that I've made a mistake, it begins a cascade of thoughts and emotions that takes the joy out of everything and makes me run for land. I was incredibly happy when I arrived in SoCal in Fall of 2022. Then, one thing went wrong. I blamed myself.
Second, that one thing going wrong took the all-or-nothing thinking route directly from 100% happy to 100% miserable in about six seconds. I'm constantly seeking to validate my life with an unattainable perfection, so anything going wrong tends to ruin it all, like the mako. I absolutely panicked. Conditions were perfect to recreate the painful emotional atmosphere of my entire childhood and I fell right into old patterns. I'm so happy that this time I had a meditation practice that allowed me to notice something was off, a great therapist to help me sift through it, and a supportive sangha that showed me love and belonging the entire time.
Now, whenever I notice certain strong feelings in my body or particular thoughts in my head, instead of beating myself up like a thresher would with its long, whip-like tail, I can use strategies to alleviate that suffering, like the guided meditation called soften, soothe, allow. I can notice what's happening in my body and mind and respond differently. I have put in the work in this part of my life, too. At some point, I imagine this process will be flow more easily, but right now, I've just stood up on my first real emotional waves with conscious awareness. I wonder what it will feel like for it to be something my body more naturally does. Perhaps this is what freedom will feel like?
There is still a path to walk toward that freedom. I'm beginning to contemplate what forgiveness looks like, incorporating this grief into my body, and moving forward with a newly attained balance. I've always had this notion that grief is something you feel for awhile, longer than sadness of course, but at some point, it goes away. My emotional education has been sorely lacking. BTG says, "Grief is an integrative process." A new reality has been born. New realizations. Losses. Anger and sadness. I have been telling myself a story of lost potential and mourning who I could have been. But he went on to say that I am not going to find out who I am now by figuring out who I could have been. Prosecuting the past keeps the harm alive, perpetuates it, but now by my own hand. Paying undue attention to the interlopers screws up my present and my future. So I can learn to face them differently, without running away.
Instead of staying lost in the churn of this mental cycle of mourning-grieving-blaming-worrying, I can focus on right now. Instead of creating new situations in which I ask the world to validate me and then expect it not to do so, I can continue to validate my own feelings and soothe the ache without recreating the whole traumatic process of my childhood. I can incorporate my losses into the larger balance sheet of my life -- and who among us doesn't have losses at this point? Not ignoring them, or moving past them, but finding balance with them, because they are a part of me.
I've started reading Forgiveness: An Alternative Account by Matthew Ichihashi Potts. In it, he is trying to redefine forgiveness not as a backward-looking, economic transaction, trading suffering in punishment as payment for past wrongdoing, but as a way "to accept that past and to be open to the only possible future that can follow from it." Forgiveness, in its "refusal to forget its wrong imagines what a wronged life lived well might be." In a powerful passage, he writes, "...wrongdoing cannot be compensated, reconciliation remains impossible, and wounds will never fully heal.... It is about accepting that what has been lost cannot be regained.... Forgiveness of this sort is more tragedy than triumph, less miracle than mourning. It is a strategy for surviving an irrevocable wrong. It declines to escrow the life of the future to a past that cannot be changed or to a pain than cannot be compensated."
Wow. It declines to escrow the life of the future to past that cannot be changed.
In changing the definition of forgiveness, I can discontinue punishing myself and others for an imperfect past. There is no amount of punishment that will change things, and punishment only increases suffering. We can put space around the wrongdoing, gain some distance from it, as a closer look at the original words for forgiveness indicate in Potts' research. Instead of "inviting some redemptive suffering to reimburse" the wrong, we can simply move away from it toward whatever future we can find. Space promotes perspective; perspective leaves more room for acceptance and integration. Anne Lamott recently wrote, "After all the losses, disappointments and deaths that every older person has experienced, we usually discover how life miraculously goes on, reshapes itself toward homeostasis and more grace than we could have imagined. We learn to look beyond our dire imaginings and trust that this miracle might just happen again. I once heard someone say that hope is faith with a track record."
Forgiveness and grace. Equanimity and space. Balance. Hope. Forward facing with the grief and whatever else we got left. Acceptance. Agreement. An invitation and acceptance. Integrating all of this to find peace.
There will always be interlopers. Thresher and mako sharks are the least of them. Death, disappointment, losses of all kinds...life on this earth is harsh. In Southern California, there are many surf breaks that are REALLY crowded in the summer time. At some of those breaks, party waves don't exist peacefully. People are angry, entitled, ego-driven and literally shove others off of their boards to claim a wave. I'm so delighted that I have found places that are kind and welcoming and mostly forgiving of beginners. Physical places like Blackies and perhaps at San Onofre this summer. And emotional spaces, like the Sisterhood, a good therapist, friends who have stuck with me all along, and my lovely meditation sangha. I look forward to the time when my own mind is as peaceful and welcoming -- as forgiving -- as these spaces. Coexisting with the canyon dwellers, staying in the flow.
I've spent some time trying to imagine what it will feel like when I can surf the emotional waves as well as I did the salty ones last weekend. I have a clear idea of what I want my life to look like -- I'm slowly coming to the realization that what it looks like doesn't matter. I'm sure I looked fairly ridiculous on Saturday -- like a wobbly toddler in a neoprene onesie taking her first steps. But I know what I felt like -- coasting, free, uninhibited, balanced. What my life looks like matters less than how I feel inside. Cultivating that equanimity is going to take some more practice. But this is progress. The girl who stood up on a surfboard the other day stood up with all of her past selves and potential selves on board -- even the ones who no longer have a chance to live. We did it together. Party wave.
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