Do not come to the south of California to find love. I came because I was tired.
Tired of working too many hours with chronic disease. Tired of my lateral concert running ultramarathons. Tired of going out with men in New York who looked good on paper, but left me feeling even more invisible than me when I was a child, when my mother called me “garbage” for having a congenital cataract that left me legally blind in one eye.
At 45, he was a doctor with an acquired autoimmune disorder, a long trace of self-sabotage and without having an idea of how to be loved. Intimacy terrified me. My body could withstand 50 miles of career, but an appointment for dinner? That felt a risk that I could not survive.
Then, one January, off the coast of Laguna Beach, I went to the paddleboard for the first time. It was supposed to be a soft sport, something that my exhausted soul could handle. My instructor and I were far from the shore when the sea calmed down. There are no ships. Noiseless. Only blue on blue.
It was then that she got up.
A 40 -ton gray whale appeared by my side, jumping spy, they call it, its imposing grace raising from the water, close enough so that the walnut brightness of its left eye could see. She floated in my field of vision for 20 seconds silent and with heart.
Then it sank under the peaceful glass.
I started crying inside.
Maybe it sounds ridiculous. But I swear that the whale, who would later name Molly, saw me. Not as a triathlete, not as a patient, not as a curriz. Only me. The girl with a good eye that finally had some vision. The woman who had spent her life tilting with the worth. Someone who wanted to be chosen but who had no idea what that meant.
For the first time, I felt affirmed by something bigger than the effort.
Back on the coast, my instructor said I was lucky. I had never seen anything like that. But he didn't feel like luck. He felt as an invitation. The ancient tide had emerged only for me.
In the weeks that followed, I wrote. I rested. I stopped trying to be small and manageable. I began to believe that it could actually be worthy of kindness, of belonging. And then I met James.
It was not striking. It was not complicated. It was only the great guy directed by a bicycle store. And he didn't make me go after him.
What he did was make me ginger tea.
James asked how I felt and really listened to the answer. I was still appearing, even though I greeted him with my best Marlon Brando detachment.
I said: “Look, Buster, you're barking the wrong tree.” My satiety appetite, not needing anyone, my fight. But his quiet care placed me on me. He taught me how to cook around 20 food allergies. He hugged me for hours when I was in physical anguish even though his arm fell asleep.
We were opposite in many ways and yet it worked.
My refrigerator used to be a sanctuary for exhaustion: vitamin shelves, perhaps a mustard bottle, nothing like a meal. I joked that my spices were in my attitude.
But James did not shuddered. A flesh and potato boy by nature, launched my world of food restrictions and improvisation based on plants. Armed with what is passed through kitchen utensils in my little equipped kitchen, it made everything work. Laughing when he opened cabinets that resonated with the void, he asked: “Seriously, where do you keep the salt?” I pointed out the fridge.
He met me in chaos more than once. When a massive storm knocked out power and sent the world out to a flashy uncertainty mist, without lamppings, without a signal, without security network, James was there. He found me in the dark, packed the car and drove. We did not have a plan, only each other and the puddle roads.
We end somewhere quiet, a small inn illuminated with support and kindness power. I don't remember the name, but I certainly remember how it felt sure.
It was even worse. Through a nine -hour mastectomy with reconstructive surgery that was carved through fear and tissue. Through the long and slow care that followed a diagnosis that nobody wants. My life had passed in motion: run, answer, survive. But when I couldn't run anymore, he didn't run either. He slept vertically in a cracked vinyl chair next to my hospital's bed for days, leaving alone for dinner when my brother came to sit with me. With James, there was no great gesture. Only presence and love, quiet and relentless.
Years later, when he finally retired from decades of operating his bicycle store, we went to the road again. This time by choice. I returned to compete: triathlons, long races, challenges of all kinds. But now James was fighting a cancer recurrence, his legs wrapped in mysterious wounds that took too much to diagnose. And yet he said yes to each adventure and anything new. We traveled together, we ran, city to city, living in suitcases and sunrises.
Although he never addressed himself, James brought my initial line concerns as if they were his. One morning before my triathlon, he stopped the car, pale and dizzy. “I think I'm going to vomit,” he said, with his hand on his stomach. Somewhere on the road, he had changed his witness to a partner.
And I understood: I could receive this. I could say yes to let someone in.
Because Molly had seen me first. In an impressive investment, that gigantic mammal had caught me.
I still think about that whale. About his quiet power and that soft and unbelcompeding look.
She taught me more in 20 seconds, a new way of listening, feeling and understanding, what I had learned in 30 years of psychoanalysis and resistance sports. That sometimes the bravest thing you can do is be still. Be real. Be open.
Molly seduced me to know that real power lives in the opening, being available, not invincible. That day I left the Pacific Ocean, but I left behind the belief that love was something for what I had to hurry. That I had to shrink, impress or exaggerate to deserve it. I left my performances for being.
And in space where all that effort used to live, something unexpected came: love that did not need to be persecuted, fixed or cattle. I just offered, and finally, received.
James and I are still together after 15 years. Not because I became someone new, but because I finally stopped hiding what it was already.
The author is psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and teaches psychiatry residents as a clinical assistant professor at Icahn's School of Medicine in Mount Sinai. Routledge recently published his book, “Psychoanalytic and spiritual perspectives on terrorism: desire for destruction.” She lives with her partner in the Hudson Valley. She is on LinkedIn: Nina-Cerfolio-MD
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
