Waves

Recognizing and coming home to a recurring force in my life

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Some cultures believe in spirit animals: protective or guiding spirits with which individuals maintain a special connection for life. It’s said that the living, earthly counterpart of your spirit animal is something that will have a habit of showing up over and over again in your life.

And that’s about all I’ll say without overstepping the bounds of my confidence on the subject.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if there are non-living equivalents to this: spirit “forces” or “objects,” for instance. There are almost certainly cultures that believe in such things. And it’s a concept I’ve grown more curious about lately.

Clarifying Waves

The past six months have been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for me: lots of fast-paced twists and turns in my life that I didn’t see coming. I ended a six-year long relationship; I moved into a new apartment, where I’m now living alone for the first time in my life; I started a new job doing a very different type of work than I had ever done before or ever imagined myself doing; and then there’s whatever the shit is going on here as I try to figure out my identity and future goals as a writer.

With all of that going on, it’s been tougher to maintain a sense of peace and stability than it had been for a while.

But the one thing that’s consistently helped me in that sense, to a deeply humbling degree, has been visiting beaches.

I went to the beach a lot growing up in South Florida, but it never really impacted me in a particularly strong way back then. Even as recently as last Summer, going to the beach was just one among many social activities, like going out for dinner or drinks with friends—pleasant enough, but nothing profound.

Something has changed.

In all likelihood, it will take me some time before I can more closely convey through words what I now feel when I spend time at a beach, whether I’m with others or by myself.

Back when my writing was—not so long ago—more focused on religion and spirituality, I explained how central silence is to my own experience of spirituality: it was the defining feature of the single most powerful spiritual experience I’ve had, as well as a broader component of what you might call my philosophy or disposition toward life and the way I make meaning in life.

And that’s probably the easiest, most simplified way to describe what happens to me when I set foot on the sand: an immediate, blissful sensation of total psychophysiospiritual silence.

It’s a peaceful, cleansing, clarifying feeling. But it also freaks me the fuck out sometimes.

I’ve had days- and weeks-long periods scattered throughout these last few months when my mind has felt like a yawning maw of quicksand, swallowing me up and dragging me deeper and deeper the more I struggle. I get caught in a tempest of confused, obsessive thoughts, from which escape seems impossible.

But no matter how horrid a mood I’m in, no matter how agitated and distractible I’m feeling, as soon as I’m at the beach, the clouds lift and all of that melts away. Instantly.

How is that possible? It doesn’t make sense to me. And the incomprehensibility of it is scary.

A few days ago, that feeling of peace and clarity rose to such heights within my body that I found myself involuntarily grinning while walking along the shore by myself. Then, I almost burst out laughing as I thought about how creepy that must’ve looked (I live in Boston, where it’s socially and legally obligatory to never smile in public).

It feels creepy, too. I’m a naturally pretty stoic person. I’m not a spontaneous smiler. That total transformative effect of being on the beach feels creepy because, as pleasant a feeling as it is, it feels like an invasion. It feels like—to put things in more spiritual terms—channeling, like being inhabited by a disembodied spirit.

So, I’m starting to think that the wave is my “spirit animal.”

I’ve developed a new sensitivity to it over the past few months, but it has been with me in various areas of my life for years. I think what’s changed is my vantage point and relationship with it: I spent so long fearing and fighting against the waves, but I now find myself on the shore, from where I can now look toward and listen to the waves, and allow them to inhabit me without being fully swallowed up by them.

Keratin Waves

I had kept my hair short throughout my entire childhood. The longest it got was during the period between ages 5 and 12 or so—a period my brother affectionately refers to as our Jersey Shore phase: think spiked hair, gold chains, wife beaters, and (in my case) a deep, dark tan, courtesy of the Sunshine State. Regrettably, I don’t have a great picture of the full get-up, but here’s a snap of the spiked hair, at least.

Not a bad look, right?

But I got lazy eventually and just went the buzz cut route for the duration of my high school years and my first year in college. All the while, the true character of my hair was lying dormant. It wasn’t until my Sophomore year in college at the age of 19 that I—along with my mom, my dad, my brother, and everyone else—discovered I actually had hair on the wavy-curly spectrum.

It was fun for a while: growing out my hair was like discovering a new part of myself that I didn’t know existed. It made me unique. It was kind of fun to play with. It looked good spilling out of my lacrosse helmet: “a little too much salad for the bowl,” as a commentator for one of our games put it.

I’m on the left, but notice the unplanned and synchronistic presence of the wave logo on my opponent’s helmet :)

But man, what an absolute headache it was. I had no idea how to live with long, wavy hair. I didn’t know what products to use, I didn’t know how to get it trimmed, I didn’t know how to comb or brush it, and I, for some reason, didn’t care to ask for help or advice with any of this.

It was totally unmanaged and inconsistent. The top often looked flat and straight, while the sides and back got longer, wavier, thicker, puffier, and messier.

Eventually, during my Senior year in college, I just rage-quit on the whole thing. I woke up and thought, “You know what, today’s the day.” I went into the bathroom, took out my beat-up electric shaving razor, and started going to town on my head.

My roommate walked in when I was about 80% of the way done.

“Want to help me with the back?” I asked him casually, as he stood there in stunned silence.

With a bit of his help, I shaved myself completely bald.

But then I started to miss my hair. I was back to looking like a garden variety white guy with my short, boring noggin stubble, and I didn’t like that. I wanted to feel special again.

So I let it grow back.

By my second year in graduate school, it was long enough that I was having all the same problems again. I understood my wavy hair a bit better, but evidently not well enough to really tame it.

So, I cut it again—not down to the scalp, but still pretty short.

And then—would you believe it—I grew it out again. I went through a brief man bun phase and a less brief ponytail phase. So, I was at least trying some new things. My hair was still a bit of a mystery to me, but I was managing the waves much better.

Finally, I settled on a nice medium length, which remains the case today: enough for the waves to show, without them feeling like too much of a hassle.

Moody Waves

Maybe this is just my symbolism/synchronicity-sensitive spiritual side speaking, but there’s an eerily close correspondence between this short biography of my hair and my journey with bipolar disorder.

Symptomatically, bipolar disorder is very much a wavelike condition. There are days-long (or, less frequently, hours- or weeks-long) periods of riding high on the crest of a wave. Everything is clicking during these periods: for me, they’re the periods of greatest creative and intellectual insight, peak athletic performance, and an aura of charismatic charm that brings with it elements of confidence and ease in social interactions that, from my perspective, make me superhumanly compelling company and irresistibly attractive on dates.

And there’s plenty of time to reap these rewards, as these periods also tend to be characterized by such an abundance of free-flowing energy that sleep becomes almost an afterthought.

Like all waves, though, this one eventually comes crashing down. And here’s where the ocean analogy starts breaking down a bit: the bipolar wave that crests in the heights of mania doesn’t just crash down to the equilibrated water line, it crashes way down to the bottom of the ocean floor where there is such a dearth of light that reorienting yourself back to the surface becomes nearly impossible.

The emergence of those mental waves in my head occurred around the age of 18—just before the emergence of the previously dormant material waves on my head.

And for just as long as I stumbled through the first unmanageable phase of long, wavy hair, I dealt with the waviest, unmanaged phase of bipolar disorder in my life: the phase when, in both cases, I stubbornly persisted in believing that I could somehow handle things on my own without seeking any help.

And right around the time I lopped off the waves of hair from the top of my head with my roommate’s help, I managed to still the wavy mood states in my head with the help of a psychiatric professional and a pair of pills that have worked wonders for me.

At that point—close to the end of my college career—I thought I was done with both types of waves. But right around the time that my hair got long enough for the waves to show again—the Summer after my first year in graduate school—I experienced a bit of a reemergence of the unstable mood waves.

In both cases, the reemergence was temporary: I cut my hair again and changed some conditions in my life that got me back to a state of relative mental tranquility.

The one major difference in the stories is how much longer it took for me to learn a very important lesson in relation to my moods than it did with my hair:

The waves always come back.

Medication made such a huge improvement in my mood states that, for a while, I told myself (and others) that I was asymptomatic. In proportion to how severe things were before—especially the depressive lows—that felt true.

But as I’ve worked on becoming more observant and expressive of my feelings and mental patterns over the past year or so, I’ve come to realize that the waves haven’t disappeared; they’ve just mellowed out. They can be tamed to a great degree, but they can’t be killed. They are a part of me.

Stabilizing Waves

Creativity often comes in waves.

In my case, that general principle feels pressingly and unavoidably important to recognize and work with.

It can also be an extremely frustrating aspect of any kind of creative work.

Just a month or so ago, I was feeling better—more satisfied, more excited, more confident—about my writing than ever. I had several writing projects I was excited about: getting back into writing haiku, serializing a memoir/self-help style book about my unconventional professional life, and starting a new publication for short story writing (the most exciting project, since fiction writing is so new to me and something I always wanted to do). I gave my Substack publication a facelift to reflect those ambitions.

But the wave crested and came crashing down.

Duh. It always does.

I’ve lost all enthusiasm for those projects. For the past few weeks, I didn’t feel much like writing at all. It’s been tough getting back into it. Like I said, it’s difficult to reorient myself after the crash, even if the depths to which I crash are nowhere near as dark and remote as they once were.

And as nice as it is to no longer have to worry about the really big waves, there’s a constant longing for the next little wave, accompanied by an equally constant, slightly irrational fear that there will be no next little wave.

Maybe that’s why it feels so good to go to the beach: it’s like coming home to some primordial reservoir of little waves. I can stare out at the waves of the ocean for hours, and they will never completely stop—however slowly they develop, however calm they are, I can see with my eyes that they’re still there and recall that they’ve been there since well before eyeballs even existed on Earth.

Pensacola Beach, FL

And therein lies a paradoxically comforting sense of the steadiness of waves. If you look beyond the forceful dynamism of a singular wave, you can find something stabilizing that shines through a full living body of waves.

I see it in the ocean, and, when I sit by its shores, through some kind of resonant relationship, I feel it in myself.

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