I have a confession: I lied to the cashier at Trader Joe’s last week to make myself seem cooler than I am. (Although my effort was probably all for naught. I surely disqualified any ounce of coolness she could have assumed of me as I clumsily allowed a hunk of cheese to roll to the floor as I tried to hand it to her.) I found her a bit cold in comparison to the Trader Joe’s employees with which I have historically interacted. And because I know every person reading this is deeply invested in the conversations that happen in the Costa Mesa Trader Joe’s checkout line, I will relay a portion of our interaction below. (In order to protect her identity, I will refer to her as “Bernice”.

ME: *drops cheese (amongst other items) on the ground*

BERNICE: *stares blankly at me*

BERNICE: *starts scanning items*

ME: *realizes I am still holding a sweet potato*

ME: *chuckles nervously and quickly apologizes*

ME: *quickly sets said sweet potato on the counter for Bernice to scan*

BERNICE: *stares blankly at me*

ME: *in an uncharacteristically chipper tone* Wow, they have all the pumpkin stuff out already, crazy!

BERNICE: It’s been out, where have you been?

ME: *chuckles nervously*

BERNICE: You’re a little late; it’s almost gone. Next thing you know, it’s gonna be Christmas stuff.

ME: Isn’t that just crazy? I just can’t keep up.

At this point,BERNICE opens up a bit and enthusiastically talks about how ridiculous it is that immediately after Christmas, stores start decorating for Valentine’s day.

ME: And it’s so beautiful out, yesterday I was surfing, and tomorrow I’ll be looking for Christmas decorations! It just doesn’t feel right.

And that, my friends, is where I lied to sweet Bernice. Well, maybe it wasn’t a lie. But if not a lie, the phrase “yesterday I went surfing” was, at best, an extreme exaggeration of the truth. Had I said “yesterday I went swimming in the ocean with a surfboard” or “yesterday I fell off a surfboard while surrounded by other people surfing” or even “yesterday I screamed at any wave that was higher than my head, tumbled about in the Pacific, and chased a surfboard to shore many times”, I would have been speaking completely honestly with our girl Bernice. But I did not say any of those things because I was just starting to get Bernice to like me (or at least not appear visibly upset by my existence) so I told her I had gone surfing. She responded neither enthusiastically nor nihilistically to this statement, so I called it and win and went on my way.

All that to say, last week I went to the beach with 12 people of varying levels of surfing experience and tried my darnedest to catch some ~gnarly waves~. Troy, my friend leading this expedition (picture your classic surfer boy: flowing bleach blond locks*, ample tattoos covering his bronzed skin, and a relaxed-yet-encouraging smile), even coached me through the timing and pushed me into a few promising waves. However, despite Troy’s best efforts, most of these attempts ended up looking similar to the series of images below.

Once Troy left my side (not because I was a helpless case but because he is a caring and compassionate person who was also helping other previously landlocked shoebies like myself), I approached most of the promising waves with a nervous yelp and a frantic dive for my life as I abandoned all logic that would encourage me to hold onto my board, which, coincidentally did not have a leash and was therefore not attached to me in any way.

Therefore, this scenario led to my board being carried to shore by the power of the Pacific as I resurfaced on the opposite side of the wave and thanked my lucky stars that I was still alive. Because I am a responsible citizen who did not own the surfboard that kept escaping my clutches in pursuit of dry land, each time I let it go (which was pretty much every time a wave came), I chased it down all the way to shore, picked it up, and made my way through the breaking waves back to the rest of my friends. Let’s just say I was worn out before I could even attempt to “hang 10”.

I rather dislike being cold and I am mildly terrified of the ocean, so any sane person might wonder why I continued the pattern of chasing my board down, sighing dramatically, and returning to the churning waters that kept trying to spit me out. However, I am also rather stubborn, achievement-oriented, and want to be the best at everything, so an equally sane person might observe this behavior as determination, passion, and grit. Who knows, I probably could have inspired a series of inspirational posters about falling down and getting back up and made millions at Scholastic book fairs across the nation.

From the outside, I may have appeared to be an uncoordinated try-hard looking to prove herself. And historically, that probably would’ve been pretty accurate.** Historically, a lot of my significance and self-worth have been measured by the reactions of others and rooted in the version of myself I have created for the world to see. I have spent an abundance of mental and physical energy trying (often subconsciously) to micromanage the way people view me and make sure I display all of the traits I’ve decided are “good” while deeply burying anything that could be perceived as “bad”.

Now I’m not naïve enough to think that I am unique or special in any way for living like this; I’m sure there are millions of people out there who can empathize with wanting to show their best face to the world and shove everything else into the deep crevices of their soul. This is nothing new in the grand scheme of human history and readers may be wondering why I felt the need to elaborate in great detail about my conversation with the Trader Joe’s cashier in order to paint an elongated metaphor that depicts a common reality.

Here is the symbolism I have, up until this point, done a pretty bad job at articulating. My whole life, I have allowed my value and my identity to be determined by what I can do: physically, intellectually, you name it. Being bad (or even “less good” than the people around me) at whatever I’m doing has brought shame, self-deprecation, and the tendency to either wear myself out in pursuit of unachieved perfection to the point of misery or totally retreat from the attempt altogether.

Growing up, when I was outside the gym, I relished my identity as a gymnast because it made me feel unique and special; but inside the gym I was frequently filled with shame because of my inadequacy in comparison to the people around me. This led me to the need to prove myself and make sure people there knew that I was competent and successful in some part of my life; that I wasn’t the total failure I knew they perceived me to be.

Now I would like to pause here and address any potential confusion; you probably thought this post was about surfing. Or maybe about Trader Joe’s and holiday marketing timetables? How, you may wonder, did we get to childhood inadequacy??? I am here to affirm your sanity and acknowledge the discombobulated nature of my brain. More importantly, I suppose, I am here to connect all of these seemingly unrelated themes (if only tangentially).

The other day I tried over and over again to “catch a wave” (as the cool kids say) and my final attempt was no closer to being successful than my initial one. Not only was I neither succeeding nor even improving, but the people around me, people from places like North Dakota and Wisconsin (aka nowhere near the ocean), were getting the hang of it (pun intended) and standing up beautifully as I endured face plant after salty face plant. Historically, my continued failure (especially amidst others’ success) would have humiliated and therefore infuriated me, but unlike my sneaky surfboard after getting pulled away by a massive wave, the feelings of shame and insecurity that tend to accompany failures in areas of life I have told myself should be successes didn’t surface.

At some point in the past 23 years, my brain has trained itself to believe that there are specific things in life that determine my value as a person and therefore, those things are especially important to be good at. I’ve learned that in order to matter, I need to be naturally smart, athletic, beautiful, and talented while also being incredibly hardworking and humble about all of these attributes. If I’m hardworking but lack talent, then I’m pitiful and incompetent. But if I’m talented but don’t work hard, then I’m lazy and wasting my gifts. And incompetent and lazy are two of the worst things I could possibly be.

Through growth, maturity, and a lot of therapy, I have begun to understand that maybe, just maybe, my worth is not dependent upon my abilities or work ethic. This may be a simple truth that many people take for granted and also something that, at any point in my life, I would have told you I believed and understood. However, floating around in the water the other day was one of the first times I truly experienced this reality. Instead of getting angry and embarrassed, I found myself having fun being something that I, since third grade, have sworn to myself I would never be: mediocre.

I didn’t need to be the best; I didn’t need to be good; heck, I didn’t even need to stand up. I got to spend time swimming in the (admittedly chilly) ocean on a gorgeous day without a cloud in the sky. I got to use my body to try something new and fun and challenging, spend time in the sun with my friends (when I very well could have been at work), and watch them do something incredibly impressive and make it look simple. Instead of the frustration that tends to accompany my lack of skill in a particular area, I felt genuine joy and excitement for my friends in their success.

If anyone ever wants to go surfing, I’m all in. I had a blast repetitively seeing large waves, screaming and letting go of my board, chasing down said board as it made its way to shore, and picking it up and running back into the waves just to repeat the cycle; I can’t imagine how much fun I’ll have when I actually stand up!

• Since I began writing this post, Troy let one of his friends cut all his hair off! Fortunately, this wasn’t a Samson and Delilah situation and the haircut did not eliminate his chill surfer vibes or strength, but he no longer has the flowing golden locks I have described.

**My secret about sports is that I’m not actually that good at them but I am relatively quick, I give it my all, and I tend to wear a lot of t-shirts and therefore, at least in my own mind, I can fake athleticism pretty well. But I’m a scam. Maybe everyone else already knows this and nobody actually thinks of me as athletic. Maybe I am the only I have fooled. Honestly that would be pretty poetic and I would support it.