How I Faced My Greatest Fear (and Learned to Love the Ocean)
I went for a ride on my friend’s boat in Miami. Yeah, that’s right—that’s “something terrifying” in my book.
How did it all begin? Well, here’s the weird thing. I was a coxswain (FYI—the shrimpy person who steers the boat and yells at the rowers to go faster, pull harder, etc.) for three years on my high school crew team. During the season, I was on the water seven days a week. Our turf was small, calm, back bays in a suburb of Atlantic City, but there were a couple of close calls along the way. Like the time we were out in mid-February (hello numbness, my old friend), and we “ran aground.” That means that the skeg on the bottom of the boat (a moveable triangular piece of plastic turned by the coxswain to steer the boat) got caught in mud because we entered shallow water. On that especially bitter February morning the skeg actually got stuck in the marsh because it was so damn windy, and two girls in my boat (not the delicate coxswain, of course) had to get out and shove the boat out of the marsh, knee-deep in the icy water. We booked it back to the boathouse to avoid hypothermia. It was touch and go, but that snafu didn’t terrify me. Probably because the bay was about 30 feet wide. On either side were of us were rows and rows of fancy houses. I boil my boat phobia down to the size of the water on which I’m boating, given that when I freaked out on a boat ten years later, I was on the high seas…
It was a glamorous vacation on the Italian Riviera. My friend Danny was an experienced boater and suggested we rent a boat from the marina in the town where his family had a vacation home. We brought a third person along, making the venture a bit more affordable for three 20-somethings trying to balance a European vacation with salaries from entry-level jobs. Why not jump at the opportunity to shove off into the Ligurian Sea and hobnob with the monster yachts that were a dime a dozen. If only my friends stuck back home in the concrete jungle could see me now! I thought, as I proceeded to hyperventilate and demand that I be returned to the dock as soon as we busted out of no-wake speed. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I know I freaked out because I felt trapped. I saw the shoreline getting smaller and smaller and slowly the feeling that I couldn’t leave that boat if I wanted to, that I was far from an evidently very important exit strategy. More, I just don’t gel with the bobbing up and down. How is that relaxing? How is it not a fast track to puking your guts up? Different strokes, I guess.
Fast forward two years. South Beach. Same friend. Before I even headed down to Miami to visit Danny I started freaking out that he was going to ask me to go out on his boat. I strangely still felt guilt for the Italy fiasco (because I probably ate up 30 minutes of rental time with my emergency trip back to the dock), and feared that if he asked me to go on the boat, I wouldn’t be able to let him down. I wasn’t wrong. On day three he said, “Kelly, I know boats aren’t really your thing, but I go out on the water every weekend and it would mean a lot to me if you joined me and met up with my friends at the sandbar.” Some of you reading this will think it’s extremely weird that I pushed myself to please my friend, knowing I was thrusting myself into an extremely stressful, uncomfortable state. Well, even if I was putting my friend’s feelings over my own, I must have also felt just a teensy weensy bit of courage, that maybe I could overcome my fear. On the way to the marina, we made an emergency trip to CVS for some Dramamine. I took…a few. (Did you know they make you sleepy? Like Benadryl? Mmmmm. Sleepy.) With my heart still racing despite my much welcomed grogginess, we headed out. The manatees swimming alongside us were not comforting. I purposefully buried my face in a magazine for the first ten minutes, but when we really got going, there was nothing I could do but lift my gaze to the horizon and take it all in. I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean.
Then something strange happened. I had an epiphany. I had this sudden moment of trust, the distinct sensation that it was going to be ok. I remember thinking, It’s all good. The ocean’s gonna do it’s thing, the engine’s gonna do it’s thing, Danny’s gonna steer the boat. It’s going to be ok. And it was. I still did not enjoy bobbing up and down—at all, especially 7 hours later when I was trying to fall asleep—but I realized that afternoon on my little trip from Biscayne Bay to the Atlantic that I didn’t have to be so freaked out by not knowing how I could get out of wherever I was. That sense of doom disappeared, that certainty that we were going to go up in flames or get sucked under by a whirlpool. I realized that it’s ok to not be in charge all the time, that I could relax and have a little optimism. You won’t see me getting the gang together for a boat trip anytime soon, but you will see me saying yes to invitations to things that once made me feign measles, pneumonia, bubonic plague…whatever was necessary.
Do you have a story of conquering a fear? Or a story of definitely NOT (no shame in that game)?
