Shoulda Been Here Yesterday

"You shoulda been here yesterday!" My favorite phrase and bumper sticker. It made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it. There's a joy in it and a nostalgia for the day before, a longing for the brilliant time we had and so deeply want to have again. I hear it all the time, "Yesterday was so fun!" or "Yesterday was great! You shoulda been here." A similar phrase came out of my mouth one day at Blackies. It was a big day: big waves coming fast and frequent, one right behind the other. But after a couple of hours, the frequency died down. Waves were still big, but few and far between. I had just escaped the water with my life and was headed to the shower by Tower 24. A man on a bike with surf rack and a small board was sitting there checking out the conditions. He said, “How was it?” I responded, without thinking, “Oh, it’s still big, but it died way down. You shoulda been here earlier!” I realized what I just said, and said right away to his surprised and irritated face, “What an asshole thing to say, I’m sorry!” And laughing, continued to the shower. A guy with a small board would have loved the joyful chaos of the morning. Everything changes so fast. When a surfer says wistfully, "Shoulda been here yesterday," she is longing for things to stay the same.

Doheny State Beach, looking toward the cloudy sunrise and lifeguard tower 12.

But the conditions are constantly changing. Swell height and speed and wave period. Wind speed and direction and tidal highs and lows. How busy and friendly the break is. How many tourists on the beach. Is there a blackball time limit from the lifeguards? Ground swell and wind swell combos. Weather. Is there a lovely cover from the foggy marine layer or is there a bright blue sky? Are there dolphins? Sea lions? Other sea creatures? Kelp that catches on your fin? So many factors, every moment changing. When I started, I couldn’t name any of these factors besides wave height and weather. Now, not only do I know about a wider range of conditions, but I have surfed in them. I have grown confident in my ability to handle different conditions.

Change is everywhere. I remember one day we got to San O and it was sunny and beautiful. The fog was way out to sea along the horizon. Within an hour, we were fogged in. Couldn’t see the shore. Could barely see each other. I love those foggy conditions, a soft blanket around me as I float, but if it's too thick, it's unsafe. I paddled in that day after awhile. Couldn't see a thing. I love the fall and winter at Blackies, because it's so clear. Catalina Island appears again in our sights 22 miles off shore; but most of the summer, I forget it exists. Too much fog enveloping us every week. May Gray, June Gloom, real things.

Even in a single surf sesh, things change. The tide pulls out or pushes in and where the waves break moves. It's hard to surf with people, because everyone takes different waves in, so friends are surfing in and paddling out at different times. Conversations stop mid-sentence to catch a wave, then resume fifteen minutes later when everyone has reassembled. Sometimes, at bigger breaks on bigger days, people just get separated and you don't find them again until the parking lot. The sun moves, changing the light. The water looks different, sometimes super clear, sometimes murky; fish swim below you, and you can see dolphins moving around in deeper water. One day, we saw a towboat pulling a big dredger, and then a speed boat pulling a water skiier further out to sea. A jetski stalled out beyond the pier and the harbor patrol moved in to help, calling a helicopter to show up. So busy with stuff happening that morning! Just life happening, moving around, and we sat, on our boards, watching it all happen.

I surf the jetties now at Newport just as often as Blackies. I can hold my own where I once thought only the big pool surfers surfed. (The big pool has now moved to Trestles and Huntington.) The rocks at San O and Doheny no longer bother me; at the beginning, I thought they were life threatening. It has been an amazing three years of learning to surf. So much change in such a short time. Emotionally, repairing five decades of neglect has not been easy, nor is the job finished, but I'm so much better at flowing with the changes now, surfing the inevitable undependability of life itself, of relationships. Surfing has been key to that journey of healing. I have some sense of the surfer strength I aspired to a few years ago.

You shoulda been here yesterday. I can see more clearly the conditions of the environment that created the first version of myself. I thought my childhood was normal, that I had "the good parents." And to some degree, I did. My parents did their best with what they were given -- there is no more blame here, for myself or for them. I can see, though, the survival defenses that built up over the years that caused me to abandon myself, to be so other-focused, and not develop my own sense of autonomy. I can see, and still live with, the hypervigilance constantly scanning for danger, the dissociation and raw fear that are sometimes triggered by certain circumstances, and the tendency to dismiss red flags and persist in relationships that may not be healthy for me.

I can see what I was taught in my childhood by my present-day behaviors. I attach very quickly to anyone who gives any sign of mutuality in relationship. When I realize that perhaps I don't matter to the other person the way I thought I did, my habitual reaction is to feel rejected. That rejection is felt as not caring, and I feel someone not caring about me as very dangerous. I have experienced people turning abruptly from someone who I loved and trusted, to someone cruel and selfish. So the not caring makes me fear cruelty is on the way. I brace for it. I dissociate, feel dizzy and speech gets difficult. There is an internal disintegration that feels like my insides are pulling away from my skin, and that feeling lasts for days. I feel like I'm wearing a very tight shirt made of coarse sandpaper. Social anxiety increases and I withdraw from my normal activities and an overwhelming anxiety takes over. In the language of complex trauma, it is an emotional flashback to a different time that puts me in a state of fear. Everything is filtered through that fear.

That's the karma hand-me-down: I lived with people who were limited, so I adapted to limitation. I was invisible, not seen or heard, my emotions not reflected; I was left to fend for myself when I was upset, certain emotions unwelcome or punished. Making myself small and palatable felt normal. Not having a self was something I didn't notice. I felt invisible and didn't know any different, so I stayed with people, cultivated relationships with people, on the basis of that invisibility. Their needs came first. I didn't even know I had needs. It took my body being physically threatened to allow something else to break through. That inner self that had always been there finally broke through, and I reached for something different. Dr. Vera Hart wrote in a recent essay, "That is a different kind of loneliness. It does not always look dramatic from the outside. A person can remain married, employed, organized, and socially appropriate while living for years without real emotional witness. Sometimes the mind does not begin to fray because something violent has happened. Sometimes it begins to fray because no one has truly come toward it in years."

Loneliness. The lack of emotional witness felt lonely. That's a deep belief I have -- that I will always be lonely. I feel lonely in the middle of other people. This is one of the deeply buried beliefs that I am surfacing, because the quality of our minds determines everything. My beliefs and thoughts determine what I actually see and expect of this world and the people in it. My beliefs and thoughts determine what I can actually take in. I was surrounded by kindness and a loving community when I was very young, but it was ripped away at some point, perhaps when I was three. I think the birth of my sister overwhelmed my mom, and after that, her voice rings in my head, "You'll just have to take care of yourself." No one explained to me what a sister was; no one explained how things would change or involved me in the change. I was left to take care of myself; the baby was more important.

We then moved away from the supportive neighborhood I found some solace in; again, no notice, no explanation, no soothing. I overheard my parents arguing about moving and I asked my mom later, "Are we moving?" She yelled at me. Again, asking for help is not an option, it's punishing. How deeply lonely, to have no one really keep you in mind. I'm then five years old and on my own to cope in a new neighborhood without the loving neighbors and babysitters that I knew so well. By then I felt so wholly unworthy of kindness, love, and attention, that I just disappeared. As I grew up, if kindness, love, and attention existed in my life, I couldn't see them. I developed relationships with people who were abandoning, selfish, and cruel, because that is what felt more normal.

Changes in my young life came so fast and without explanation that I could never rest in a feeling of security. I was never soothed. These were "bad changes" so therefore, change became bad, an omen. Everything felt dangerous and I was always on the lookout for the next big thing to rip the rug out from under me. That and several other "Inception messages" have stayed with me. From the movie, Inception, some messages are learned so young, buried so deep, that I don't even know they are running my life. "I'm unworthy," and "Other people have families," and "These people aren't safe," are messages that get in the way of my current life. They are still here. I am simply aware of them and their influence now. These messages created a story that I created my life and relationships according to. Now I'm writing a different story.

You shoulda been here yesterday. These past three years have been such a period of growth and change. My story changes every day. This is a good kind of change. If we only have the present moment, and the past, present, and future are only the "scenery" of the present, as Uchiyama Roshi said in Opening the Hand of Thought, then this story will continue to evolve as my understanding and compassion grows in different directions. Creating a coherent narrative is a key strategy for overcoming trauma and neglect. And I will keep combing through my beliefs and thoughts until I arrive at a better and more adaptive story. As BTG said recently, I'm now at a place where I can witness my trauma without getting retraumatized. I can see more clearly and take steps to regulate my body, so I don't run away in a story.

And someday, I will reach a point where I know in my body that every story is empty in the Buddhist sense of that word. Every story depends on my current context, no story has an independent meaning apart from what I give it. I am constantly reinventing the story as I learn and grow. Sometimes, I think about turning this blog into a book. That might serve to calcify the story at a too early place in development. Any book will have to leave open the possibility -- the probability -- that in a few minutes, months, or years, the story will change. Perhaps enlightenment is giving up our stories all together.

But what would it look like to give up my stories all together? Abandon meaning entirely? Just witness? It might have something to do with just sitting on our boards watching the towboat, the speedboat, and the jetski. Just sitting. Watching the world go by and seeing it, actually seeing it without telling a story about it either while it's happening or after the fact. It might have something to do with just living and not narrating our living with judgements and commentary coming from inside our heads. It might have something to do with dealing with the world as it is and not as we wish it would it be. Acceptance of whatever is happening at the moment. As Pema Chodron has described: bringing an unconditional friendliness to every moment, just as it is.

You shoulda been here yesterday. The Sisterhood was such an overwhelming force for me! At the beginning, I couldn't imagine losing it. Then I did imagine losing it, but it wasn't really lost, it was just changed. It is still a quiet, steady force. A supportive and loving place where we can live our lives, find compassion and kinship, though the people who move through it change. This is a troubling change at times for me. I didn't lose the Sisterhood, but I did lose a few people I loved. I get attached to people very quickly. I see the good in them immediately, seek to understand them and their story maybe too quickly, and accept them for what they can give without adequate deference to myself and what I need. I am developing a better vetting process for friends. Or maybe simply a looser grasp on the ones I do love.

And the moment of change is still painful for me. As Dr. Rick Hanson said on his podcast with his son, Forrest, Being Well, “Relaxing attachment sucks most of the time. It is not a pleasant experience in the moment because the mind wants to be attached for [many reasons]. We have biological needs. We have attachment desires. And so most of the time, whether you're going through a big self-identity change or you're just relaxing your attachment to the idealized relationship or to some outcome out in the world, there is pain in that moment. And so I think that part of the process is getting real about there being a certain degree of uncomfortable emotion. That is going to arise alongside the relaxation of attachment. And then we can do various things to fill ourselves up. We can do things alongside the discomfort to help ourselves manage it. But I think it's, unless you are an extremely practiced person, the moment of releasing the pleasurable experience, whatever that is, just comes with a certain degree of discomfort."

Yes. Ugh. I hate that part. Dr. Hart wrote of a patient of hers who lost a seemingly innocuous item, "But he kept saying the same sentence over and over: it is not the same. What struck me was not the insistence itself but the grief inside it, because the grief was far larger than the object, which is often the first clue that what we are looking at is attachment and not preference, not stubbornness, not poor insight, but attachment in its most stripped-down form, attachment to a cue that says someone thought of me, someone brought this for me, I came from somewhere, I belong somewhere, I still exist in another person’s mind."

For awhile, I felt like I existed in this really safe place I called the Sisterhood. We surfed together every week. It was automatic, I didn't have to doubt my place in it or if people would show up. It was a routine that helped me trust the world. Then it changed, and I did not cope well with the change. It could be that the neglect I suffered made that change worse. Dr. Hart continued, "The same pattern exists far outside hospitals and diagnoses, in ordinary lives, in high-functioning people, in professionals, in parents, in people who look calm, competent, and very much in control of themselves. And I say this not only as a psychiatrist but as someone who knows this from the inside, because I can feel how quickly a small disruption can become emotionally enormous when it touches an attachment point, how a familiar routine can become a lifeline without announcing itself as one, how a specific place in a morning class can stop being just a place and become part of the scaffolding that holds the day together, and how losing that place can disturb something much deeper than preference, because the reaction is not really to the spot itself. It is to the loss of predictability, of orientation, of a familiar place where the body had learned, quietly and without words, that it could settle."

The Sisterhood allowed me to settle, to feel safe. Now, I find new places to settle. And one of them is right here.

People have their own needs and move on to meet them. I've moved so often, too, that it's weird to be the one staying. And I am staying now. As much as I can plan to stay, I am staying put. On a recent podcast, psychologist Paul Wachtel said, "The most fundamental change comes from being less afraid of ourselves, less ashamed, less guilty, finding what's been pushed away. What we need to find out in the course of therapy is not just what we've been hiding from ourselves but what we have become afraid of in ourselves." Moving on, for me, has mostly been driven by fear, or shame, or a misguided desire to find a place in this world where I can belong -- like there was something wrong with the place that prevented my belonging, not my self. I moved away from Chicago after I got divorced, because I couldn't live in the place where I had betrayed myself so badly. I moved away from Dallas after the pandemic, because I couldn't live in the place where others had betrayed me and themselves so badly. That I am staying connected with my surf sisters during this change is massive growth, even as I do it imperfectly, messily, painfully.

I was running from betrayal and shame. The shame of not protecting myself from the inside and not feeling like I was a self worth protecting from the outside. I've been so afraid of further harm, I have literally run away when faced with difficulty in the past. I'm choosing to stay in Southern California no matter what happens, because I will no longer betray myself or be run out of town by the cruelty or insanity of others or by my own perceived powerlessness in the face of it. I have found myself here. My Self. My very sane and lovely Self, very messy, very vulnerable and powerful Self. My sisters helped me do this. David Whyte said, "The place where the most life is is where land meets water meets air." It's a mess. The borders aren't clear. Everything is mixed up and contradictory. Perplexing. And it's amazing. I'm ready for more life in my life. Already building those internal resources that fill me up. No more running. I am solid now, more in myself, I can see where my mind and its beliefs have run me out of town, and I'm no longer a victim of my own history. We are definitely not going back to yesterday. Been there. Done that.

Life isn't dependable, neither are most people. I can relax into that reality of undependability and ride it, like I do the wavy waves, and I find that my attachment issues relax as self-trust grows. Hanson again, “Being able to be centered and calm, even when things are rocky around you, can really help you feel and accept what is happening. Also, be kind to yourself. It's scary. It's disappointing. It's frustrating. It's mind-blowing sometimes when you realize about undependability. Be nice. It's hard to bear. The actual undependability that truly exists all around us is hard to bear.” So it is difficult, but I'm learning to hang loose here.

Building up my own internal resources allows me to, in Hanson's words, “ hold life more lightly, because we start feeling filled up by love, and we're more able to release, and we start to realize that our own contractions, our own pressures, our own attachments, are like a heavy boot on the neck of other people. So that's a major thing to call out, the principle of the heart.” When I can handle my own history better, I can exist with people in more healthy ways, not asking them to meet me in a place of my healing, but of mutual grace. When I fall back into invisibility and ignore my self, tired of healing all of this, I can remember that I'm doing this for others, too. So my other-focus can be pulled out when I need it to stay on the path. There are no faults that are not also gifts. Every quality has its light and dark side.

You shoulda been here yesterday. It was great. The Sisterhood had one of our brilliant potluck surf picnics at Doheny. Surf Sister Maria organizes them and her husband brings a big propane grill and cooks for us while we surf. Everyone brings something and we have a very generous feast post surfing. Yesterday, there were about 15 of us there. Some original members of the group and some newbies. They are lovely additions. Not all changes are tough. It was lovely to see the different connections and deep kinship felt at every table. Conversation came easily. Lots of hugs and joyful laughter. It was beautiful. I recognize that people flow into and out of my life as I flow into and out of theirs. Like there's nothing attaching a surfboard to a wave, I can hold these relationships loosely, flow with them. Love no less ardently, but without grasping and trying to hold them in place. We're surfers after all. We move through the water with as much strength and grace as we can.

Surfer Strength is a wonderful metaphor. Being a surfer and being in community with these women, our Surf Senseis, and BTG has helped me develop a vision of what it means to be truly strong and capable in this world. While I may have started out as a terrified child, I am now a surfer. Surfers...

• Flow with the conditions. See the waves, what is actually happening in the moment, and proceed with balance, equanimity, and grace. A cognitive understanding is part of the ride, but it's about letting go, not grasping. It's about hanging loose.

• Understand the laws of physics physically. Feel the waves. The natural order of things occurs in the body. Flexible, attuned, noticing -- these are somatic realities. Noticing subtle changes in the waves, in my balance, and making adjustments to keep flowing. Secure and stable, self-contained, the body sometimes making thousands of micro-adjustments to stay gliding above a moving sea. It does so automatically with practice.

• Fully accept whatever comes floating by and understand that they can reckon with it. Accept the terms of the agreement from Mother Ocean: joyful play AND great danger -- the possibility of sharks, stingrays, and who knows what. Reading the conditions, knowing my limits, and finding support when I need it.

• Pop up quickly, stand on their own two feet with glee, joy, enthusiasm. I am an independent self, no one else can surf with me on my board. Go for it, delighting in whatever comes along, knowing there is always more to learn, more ways to grow. Not taking everything so seriously.

• Greet the mutuality of the ocean with an open heart, vulnerability, and care. The water and I surf together. I interact with the community of the ocean -- all of it, the fish, birds, and mammals and water, sun, and seaweed. Interbeing. We are interdependent. The best relationships understand this mutuality.

You shoulda been here yesterday? Nah. Right now. Wish you were here right now. It's pretty cool. How I interpret today determines what I can take in and experience tomorrow. That's karma. My stories are karma. I am learning to tell better stories, to not be habitually reacting to yesterday's story. My own internal thought processes, my daily choices, the habits of mind I cultivate determine my tomorrow. The realities are changing as I learn to embody and encompass more, as I learn to be steadier on my board, and I learn that my safety now comes from within myself. Whatever comes rolling in with the tide, I can surf it. See you out there tomorrow.