On surfing and social anxiety

The ocean is terrifying and so are you

I went surfing for the first time recently. This is an essay about facing two of my biggest fears: the ocean, and what people think of me.

All my life I’ve been a magnet for anxious types. For whatever reason, every guy I’ve ever dated has been the fretting kind: guys who get to the airport three hours early, for instance. The same goes for more than a few of my close friends.

Perhaps they like me because I am so different. I am a distinctly unworried person, in a practical, day to day sense. Most of the time, I don’t sweat the small stuff.

My malaise was always of a more existential variety; less I am going to miss my train fuckfuckfuck and more my life is worthless and humanity was a mistake.

But I get to the airport 20 minutes before boarding, and I make my flight every time, thankyouverymuch.

Well, okay. Almost every time. I missed one last week. Moving on!

I got over my last missed flight in a couple of hours, but it’s taken me several years to get over a lifelong predisposition for misery-wallowing, a decade of substance abuse, and a youthfully obstinate refusal to take responsibility for my own life. Working through all this has been a process of Growing Up, an occasional theme of this Substack.

One of the most useful exercises in this growing up work has been honestly trying to answer the questions: what am I afraid of, and how is that fear holding me back?

I am afraid of the ocean.

This I have always known. I remember getting caught in the muddy green waves in Savannah as a small girl, banged about like a shoe in a washing machine, breath running out, sure I was going to die. And then surviving, covered in jellyfish stings.

I remember being in a small boat on the Indian Ocean a few years earlier, the appearance of sudden waves that seemed 100 feet high to my tiny self, launching our boat up and down like a ball off a trampoline, so that the windows showed only sky, and then only water, and then only sky and then only water, over and over again.

I remember being 11 or 12, paddle boarding in a placid teal Caribbean cove, and suddenly finding myself much further out from shore than I’d realized, the soft sand and little fish 30 feet below me seeming frighteningly far away, and couldn’t a big shark come out of no where and eat me, and frantically paddling back to land.

I am terrified of the ocean, and yet powerfully drawn to it. I am afraid she will kill me, and yet there is no place on this earth I would rather be than staring out at her from my favorite beach in Malibu.

my beach

The ocean sings to me like a siren, whispering in unknowable tongues subconscious truths about the eternity of life and the impossibilities of time. She is at once shallow and sweet, fathomless and violent, the beginning of all life and the ends of the earth.

Her inherent contradictions, the contradictions of my own feelings toward her. Fear mixed with love, and yearning. What does it all mean? What hides behind this fear within me? What lies on the other side?

I don’t like being in the ocean where I can’t touch the ground, I don’t like not seeing the bottom, and I am very, very, very frightened of getting swept out to sea or becoming shark lunch, both of which are things that do actually happen off the coast of California.

So on my 31st birthday last year, I resolved to take a surf lesson.

And you know what? It was fun :). We’ll come back to my oceanic excursion shortly.

But first, I want to talk about you.

You, mysterious, invisible reader. In-app subscriber number 72, perhaps. A colleague, a college acquaintance, an ex. Or possibly some unsubscribed lurker, you who know nothing about me, who’ve stumbled across this little essay through an algorithm that thinks you might like my writing.

I am terrified of you.

A much harder terror to cop to than my somewhat logical fear of the sea. You people can’t people hurt me, and I don’t care what you think!!! A lie I’ve told myself since childhood, a thousand and so many times.

I was a weird little kid. Bookish, awkward, aggressively outspoken with no innate ability to control the torrent of thoughts constantly tumbling from my mouth and even less an ability to consider how they might come across to any audience. I was bullied a bit, though not terribly. I spent a lot of time feeling miserably afraid of being disliked, and unhappily suspecting that I frequently was.

College was better. I made lots of friends and settled more in to myself. I developed a passionate love for marijuana that quickly became a dependency, mainly because I felt it helped me become more agreeable to people, and gave me patience and confidence in social interactions that I otherwise lacked. I still had the occasional nagging suspicion of being secretly hated, but I mostly didn’t think about it, thanks to being high as fuck all the time, and having quite a lot of fun.

After college, things gradually got worse than they’d ever been. I wound up in a relentlessly high-pressure career as a political campaign operative, and the higher I climbed, the worse I felt about how I was perceived. Crumpling under the pressures of my job, suffering through what I now recognize was an abusive five year relationship, and slowly collapsing under the weight of self hatred, I became convinced that I was one of the most hideously unlikeable people I’d ever met.

I withdrew completely from the world. I made my social media accounts private and anonymous. I lost contact with almost all of my friends and much of my family. I spent about a year in my late 20s mostly sleeping 14 hours a day and getting catatonically high, fantasizing about ending it all.

Eventually, after realizing that killing myself would be far too mean to my mom (love you, mom), I resolved to get the fuck out of bed and start figuring out how to get my life back together.

Four years later, my life is definitively more together than it’s ever been. I decided shortly after moving to LA that I wanted to find my way towards transitioning out of politics and becoming a professional filmmaker, and I’ve been hard at work writing screenplays and learning to direct. I’m working on putting together my first professional-level short film right at this moment, and it’s terribly exciting.

But you are causing me problems.

You, the 80-odd subscribers I have as of this writing. You, the 1,400 followers I have on Twitter, the thousand or so I have on Facebook and LinkedIn, the handful I have on Instagram. You, those people I met at that party. You, the person I don’t know, the person I do, the person who will read this or click on my profile or peruse the website I haven’t built yet.

I am afraid of you. Do you hate me?

Am I being annoying? Do I look stupid in that photo? Are they laughing at me? Did he ever love me? Does she think I’m a bitch? Was I being a bitch? Can I ever repair that friendship? Do I talk about myself too much? Or not enough? Do I say it in the right way? Has it all been said before? Please listen to me; oh god, they’re listening.

An unfortunate reality of this day and age is that if you want to ~make it~ as a creative professional, you’ve got to have a brand. We hate that shit, don’t we? It’s agony. If I wanted to be a performer I’d damn well perform; I ought to be able to scribble my little screenplays in the dark and hide behind the camera and only ever have to prove myself to the people I can handle face to face. Instead I’m required to present myself to the world, online, for everyone and their fucking mother to judge me. Kill me.

I like to pretend that’s what I’m so bent out of shape about; the unfairness of existing in this moment, the seemingly unavoidable necessity of spending hours crafting an online ~presence~ when I ought to be honing my craft. But let’s be honest. The real bitch of it is, I’m still just afraid.

I am afraid of putting myself out there into the world, of standing up and saying loudly and clearly, hello, this is who I am, please notice me, please give me a chance, please be my friend, please love me. Because I’ve always been afraid of that. I am terrified of being judged and rejected, by you.

And yet.

Much like my contradictory affair with the ocean, I am both terrified of and enamored with you. I love you, anonymous reader, new friends and old foes, the whole of humanity. I ache to be close to you, to understand and be understood by you, to stand in your waves and to feel you around me and to know that whatever pain you could and might cause me can never truly surpass my love for you.

So about that surf lesson.

I rolled up to a Venice Beach parking lot at 9am on a Saturday, and was greeted by surf instructor Clay, who can only be described as such a cartoonish cliché of an LA surf instructor that I almost laughed in his face when I saw him (tall, scraggly sun bleached hair, stoned as hell, etc). Shoutout to Clay, and to Clay’s surf instructor buddy, who at one point, I shit you not, actually used the phrase “that was totally primo, dude!,” to which I did actually have to laugh.

Clay took me and the other lesson-taker out to the shore and very helpfully informed us that the ocean had been entirely flat for the last several weeks, but that it had picked up quite a bit today, and we should have some good waves. I looked out at a picturesque four foot pipe and tried to choke my fear with a laugh. Of course.

After half an hour practicing our moves on the sand, Clay told us it was time to go surfing. Before we entered he warned us that the hardest part would be the start—getting across the surf line. “You might get knocked down a few times trying to make it past the waves, but the trick is you just gotta keep it pushing. Once you break through the waves the scary part will be over.” I tucked that away as a neat little metaphor for life, and moved towards the water.

Clay was right. Starting out was a bitch. The waves came hard and fast, and the third one sucked me under. In an instant flash of fear I was that little girl in Savannah again, fast running out of breath as my body got knocked about and my board got yanked behind me. But I found my way to the surface, and I pushed me forward. A few moments later, I was through. Yay. I did it. Starting out *is* always the hardest part.

I tried seven times to stand up on the board and ride a wave. On the fourth try, I got washed out even harder than before, and trudged up to the shore to catch my breath. I’d had no expectations of actually being able to surf, and as I stood on the shore I argued with myself about whether or not I couldn’t really just give up then. I tried! The point was getting on board in the ocean, not actually riding a wave. I’ve done enough. I don’t have to go back out.

But ah, fuck it. Out back I went. Clay told me, “when you’re popping up, don’t hesitate so long.” I meditated for a moment and realized, I have to just do it. I love to overthink. Are my legs in the right position? Can I talk that girl at this party? Did I try to stand up too late? Is this essay stupid? Am I going to drown? The ocean wouldn’t wait for me to logic myself into Doing It Right, and as is so often the case in life, if you get too wrapped up in getting it perfect, sometimes you’ll never do the damn thing at all.

Try number six. I stood—almost—for maybe a second. And then I crashed out. But I felt it. I hadn’t thought about it. I had just said to myself: stand up, and I did. I was close.

On the seventh and final try, I did it. I popped up, steadied myself, and fully rode a wave until the wave was no more. I almost cried tears of joy. Fuck yeah. >=]

I went home and passed out all afternoon. I was supposed to go to a party that night where I didn’t know anyone, but I skipped it. I was wiped out, and besides, there’s only so much Growing Up one can do in a day.

But I’ll go out into the world again soon, and keep pushing through the surf of my self-doubt. Maybe I’ll always start out with a lingering anxiety about whether I’ll be liked, or say the right thing, or not look stupid, but I’ll put myself out there anyway, and most of the time I’ll probably find that crossing the surf line remains always the hardest part.

And sometimes maybe I’ll stand on the shore halfway through the party and decide to go home early. Sometimes I’ll get knocked down too hard, and retreat. But I know in the grand scheme of things I’ll keep trying to stand on the board and ride the wave, because I love people, and I’m learning to love myself, and I want us to meet, and to love life together.

I probably won’t go surfing again anytime soon, though. That shit’s expensive as hell, and I’ve got $18 cocktails to save up for. Maybe I’ll see you soon at a party, or maybe you’ll connect with me here. On whatever shores our paths might cross, I hope we can be friends.