White Towel

I threw in the towel yesterday and surrendered to surfing.  I don’t really think of myself as the kind of person who gives up easily, but now that I’ve had time to reflect a bit, maybe I am a quitter.

The first thing to set me off was seeing myself surf on camera.  This was bad enough, but we had to watch it all together as a group with our coaches.  I saw myself on video and was horrified – I know my posture is bad, but is it really that bad?  How come everyone else looks so confident when they’re surfing?  What’s wrong with me?  Why is the new girl so much better than I am and she even missed a whole day of lessons?   And why is everyone here so goddamned chipper anyway?  Don't even get me started talking about the 10 year old kid who not only surfs circles around me, but is a more interesting conversationalist at dinner.

Of course, through all of this, I’m getting high fived and being told that I’m doing an off the charts phenomenal job by the Smiley Surfers.  To add insult to injury, people were acting like I had achieved something great, when I actually looked like a moron. 

It did not take long for this combination of things to result in total and complete paranoid self doubt.

Why did you decide to go to surfing school anyway?  To improve your balancing skills?!  Now that doesn’t even make any sense at all!  (in all honesty, it doesn’t).  Why couldn’t you have just practiced hopping on one foot up and down the beach a couple of times?   Because you like the water?  TRY SWIMMING NEXT TIME. 

Then we had to go out and practice all of the new stuff we’d learned in theory that day in the big, bad ocean.  I knew going into it that it was going to be a disaster and I would fail.  But I didn’t even fail, I just stopped trying which is even worse. 

After being completely rocked by a couple of waves while my fellow students surfed waves all the way into the beach, I decided to give up.  I ended up floating on my board in the back, white knuckled, shivering a little bit, staring at the horizon pleading with it to stop all waves.  It didn’t take long for me to start getting sea sick and between that, my nervousness, and the half jar of hot sauce at lunch, I was pretty sure I was going to throw up. 

 Instructors would come by and ask me if I wanted to try the next wave.  At first I would just act like I didn’t hear their question to stall so that by the time I answered the wave was already gone. Then my response turned to a look of incredulousness as if they had asked me to fly to the moon.  Finally I tried honesty and told them I was going to puke.  This was a stupid idea.  Response:  giant smile, thumbs up “Fish Food!  Awesome!”

I finished the day pretty miserable and it was all my own doing.  Giving up is a really crappy thing to do.  Would I have felt better if I kept trying to get waves and crashed every time?  I’ve spent the past 24 hours trying to convince myself the answer to this question is a resounding yes. 

So tomorrow is a new day, and I’m in 100%.  I would have liked to say today was a new day too, but it was our day off, and I even gave up on the afternoon of kayaking I was supposed to do.  But I’m going to go for it tomorrow no matter how truly horrible I am at this mind boggling sport.

I do have to say, I haven't laughed as hard as l've laughed the past couple of days with my fellow surfing students in a very, very long time.  Which sort of makes up for all the failure stuff.

On another positive note, it’s a good thing to experience complete failure now and again and reminded me I want to do it more often.  If anyone has any other suggestions besides surfing, don’t be shy.  I’ve got 10 unplanned days after surf school available that I want to fill with more life lessons and I'm thinking public humiliation could be a nice follow up.

Finally a picture of the beach.  Nice,right?

Sausage, the wonderful and well adjusted dog, despite being surrounded by unexplained exuberance on a daily basis.