Dear friends,
My quiet wish is to be someone wiry and athletic, who can twist down a snow slope, launch up a climbing route, or barrel through a glassy wave. A stranger who looks at the mountains on my Instagram profile may think that I’m already there. In reality, on most outdoor adventures, I feel clumsy and slow, compared to partners who are sleeker and better trained.
Indian kids are a common sight at spelling bees and debate tournaments, not rock crags or surf breaks. My first time hiking was in college, and I’ve still never put on a pair of skis. But this spring, I moved to Hawaii for a month and started to learn to surf. The month turned into a season and then a year, leading to more elation and vulnerability than I ever expected.
This letter is about being a beginner at something that is far from what I, or people like me, are supposed to be good at. I’ve been learning to see—both the ocean and myself, as someone who can belong.
Love,
Mishti / Vidushi
My first time in the Atlantic was a baptismal dunk on New Year’s in 2019. In my cold euphoria, the only other people I noticed were hooded men in dark wetsuits with arms crossed, looking out to sea. “Surfers,” my friend Jeff explained. What they did felt at once foreign, seductive, and impossible.
This February, however, I moved to Oahu, where my small desire to learn to surf rekindled. Oahu’s North Shore is the mecca of the surfing world, home of the most famous breaks on the pro circuit within just a few miles of dirt road. My first stop after I landed was its crown jewel: the Banzai Pipeline.
I followed Google Maps to a nondescript pullout, wondering if I was lost until I heard the rumble of the ocean. Beyond a quiet beach access path towered water that folded into layers many times the size of each surfer. One surfer at a time dropped into a wave, while the rest paddled furiously to make it over the top. Some emerged from barrels with cheers; others swam back with their boards snapped in half. Groups of friends around me onshore traded beers and watched the surfers through long camera lenses.
“I wanted to talk to them,” I texted Jeff, “but they felt too impressive and beautiful.”
That day, I signed up for a surf lesson sixty miles south at a break called Populars behind the Sheraton hotel in Waikiki, where I was relieved to find other mortals with belly fat and subpar coordination. During my lesson, my teacher Chris handed me a ten-foot board that I could barely paddle, eventually curling a foot around it to tow me to what felt like an arbitrary spot in the sea.
“Now stand!” he yelled after a few minutes, and shoved me forward. I rose up into a spray of saltwater and delicious, momentary glee. On my next wave, I crashed into the water.
“Sometimes,” Chris told me kindly, “the ocean fucks you up.”
I fell off most waves that day, with no sense of where or when to paddle. I couldn’t tell which bumps on the horizon meant paddle hard and which meant get out of the way. But I knew I wanted to feel that feeling again, and the only way to improve was to surf more.
Surfing is a notoriously difficult sport. You cannot learn its components in isolation—the only way to practice is against the morphing backdrop of the ocean. Beginners are lucky to get a few good attempts at waves per session, where they need to simultaneously predict the ocean, paddle into position, and pop-up and turn. Every wave is different, and even the same break can be unrecognizable given different swells or wind conditions. Fortune favors the young, as William Finnegan lamented in his surf memoir Barbarian Days: People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had almost no chance of becoming proficient, and usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit.
Learning to see involves reading both the ocean and—more stressfully—the lineup of other surfers. Waves are a scarce resource, and there are harsh penalties for violating rules of priority. To avoid excommunication, you need to assess who has the right of way, predict if they will go for a wave and where, and insert yourself into unclaimed water. Friends who had committed infractions recounted being yelled out of the water, run over underneath sharp fins, and even challenged to fistfights onshore. I was aware of surfing’s unspoken hierarchy, from talented local to annoying newbie, or “kook,” long before I entered the water. And as a beginner, brown person, and usually the only woman around, I suspected that I’d be at the bottom.
After my lesson with Chris, I bought a secondhand Wavestorm, the $99 Costco foam board that is a surefire way to identify a kook. I took it out at Canoes, a Waikiki surf break where tourists entered the water on boards they could hardly fit their arms around. I struggled to balance on my board and paddle without my shoulders burning. I spent most of my energy trying to avoid others but still managed to be hit twice by someone taking GoPro selfies. I counted my sessions as a win if I went unnoticed.
The fastest way to learn to see is to watch someone who already can. On the beach at Pipeline, soon after I started surfing, I met a North Shore resident named Ivan who offered to surf together next time he was on the South Shore.
As a warning, if you surf with me, I will be absolutely embarrassing, I texted him.
I don’t care down there, he said. But if you came to the North Shore, I might watch from a distance ☺
I’m never going there! I replied. This is scary enough.
For my sixth day surfing, I met Ivan at a South Shore break called Courts, stomach tight with anxiety. He didn’t know the break, so he insisted on watching the break and asking other surfers about the reef before venturing into the water. I emerged from one bungled wave after another with a self-deprecating laugh. Instead of derision, to my surprise, I found an encouraging smile.
“Not bad for someone who just started,” he told me, and invited me to go again.
Watching Ivan helped me start to develop my skills and read the ocean. I spent an entire session just practicing balancing on one of his shortboards, which I couldn’t sit on for more than a few seconds without falling. I did pop-ups on my yoga mat, filming myself and reviewing the clips in slow-motion. I picked up behavioral skills, like waiting for waves with my board pointing out to sea and clearly signaling which ones I was going for. I noticed how to avoid boils, where seawater smoothed into a circular “O” over areas of shallow coral, and to use rip currents as conveyor belts in and out of the ocean. My ribs grew sore and my legs criss-crossed with blood from coral cuts and even sea urchin spines that Ivan once wrenched out of my foot in a parking lot.
After a few more sessions, on a thick and overcast day, Ivan took me to a lesser-known North Shore break where the ocean churned disorganized mushes of whitewater. He handed me a shortboard and I stared at the sea in a place I never imagined I’d be able to surf.
“Don’t worry about catching anything,” he said. “Just try to paddle and duckdive under the waves.”
We watched the pounding shorebreak and waited for a lull. Entering the water was a gauntlet: a seconds’ delay could result in the ocean rejecting us and slamming us back onshore. When Ivan signalled, I took a deep breath, sprinted behind him into the water, and paddled as hard as I could.
On the shorter board, I could barely move. Each duckdive swept me off balance. At the break itself, everything fell still. After a few minutes, a set rolled through without warning, raising the flat water into tall walls. I tried to paddle into a wave and immediately went “over the falls,” getting sucked over the top and falling with the lip. I was held down for seconds that felt like minutes, and my body started to contract in panic. I emerged with a gasp and paddled back out in desperation. I walked out with my chest thumping, grateful that I had survived.
Bit by bit, Ivan exposed me to more breaks on the North Shore. Each came with a new lesson and a new landmark where the waves broke best—a water tower, a blue slatted house, or a series of prayer flags. After each session, Ivan told me I was progressing fast and could be really good. Whether or not it was true, I started to believe him. I moved out of my apartment in Honolulu and signed a new lease on the North Shore.
Ivan’s advice was helpful in every realm besides the lineup itself. He chose the breaks where we went carefully to provide me with a slow ramp-up and help me avoid conflict. But even at the uncrowded breaks that he liked to surf, I was the worst surfer and the only woman in the water. He had told me a lot about the hostility that he’d endured as a beginner, and I steeled myself for the same. Though my Wavestorm screamed beginner, I tried to be otherwise inconspicuous, waiting for waves far from the crowd.
To my surprise, however, I got disproportionately friendly attention. I once accidentally dropped in on a grizzled Brazilian surfer at his regular surf spot and paddled to him to apologize. Instead of yelling at me, he said I was doing a great job and told me to keep working hard. I later found out that he had once told Ivan to stay out of his way unless he wanted his limbs sliced off. On a quiet day at Velzyland, one of the North Shore’s most local and competitive breaks, I told a guy that I was just a beginner trying to stay out of everyone’s way.
“You’re not in anyone’s way!” he said. “Drop in on me anytime.”
I did endure occasional mansplaining, side comments about my Wavestorm, or fear that I was being labeled as the classic “incompetent girlfriend.” But unlike Ivan, I never got threatened out of the water. His favorite illustration of the contrast involved Eddie Rothman, the North Shore don who the New York Times once described as “holding the area in a state of feudalism for years,” arrested on charges of burglary, kidnapping, and extortion. I learned about Eddie over dinner with two surfers who said, “If you see Eddie, get out of the water.” I Googled him with my phone under the table and tried to remember his face.
A few weeks later, I saw a man on a stand-up paddleboard who I thought might resemble Eddie and realized he was paddling towards me.
“Honey, do you have the time?” he asked with a smile, then and several times later. “He’s really nice,” I told someone later. “People blow things out of proportion.” “You’re a girl,” they said.
Some of the attention I got was because my presence in the lineup was novel, but I often wondered how much of it had a sexual undertone. Someone once told me to try paddling out in a bikini to maximize my experience in the lineup. Surfer girls are supposed to twist around waves in tiny bikinis that have nothing to hold in. I, on the other hand, wear running shorts and a rashguard, conscious of where the fabric cinches around millimeters of exposed skin.
Oahu’s Olympian Carissa Moore has spoken publicly about her struggles with eating disorders and self-image as a girl on the tour who won titles but seldom made ‘hottest surfer’ lists. Whenever I’ve been the only woman in a situation, whether a philosophy seminar or a surf lineup, both my wins and losses have felt louder. As a new surfer, I didn’t have many wins. I got more allowances than a novice male, but I seldom felt like I earned respect. Billabong in Honolulu sells women’s thongs but not wetsuits. Pipeline hasn’t hosted a women’s event in a decade.
Though I laughed through most of my wipeouts, my frequent small failures sometimes coalesced into more intense self-doubt. One evening, Ivan offered to film me. It was the best way to improve, but it would entail surfing a real break alone for the first time. We drove to Pupukea, where waves were breaking near shore past thick walls of whitewater and a mid-sized crowd had accumulated. He waved me off and I walked into the water alone, aware of the camera trained on my back.
As soon as I started paddling towards the crowd, I felt a sinking pit in my stomach. I struggled to push through the whitewater, unsure of where to be and overwhelmed by the number of people around me. Embarrassed by the ticking clock, I forced myself to go for a wave. The ride dumped me back into the whitewash, where I fought to control my board and almost collided with another surfer. I decided to bail and was thrown by a shorebreak onto the beach, dripping sand. I walked back with my eyes on the ground, hot with frustration.
Ivan was waiting for me on the beach with a stoic look on his face.
“I think we got what we needed,” he said. When I suggested I try again, his expression clouded over. He told me that I could go back out alone.
“Why?” I asked.
“If you blow it alone, you’re just a girl learning,” he said, packing up his camera. “If you’re with me, you’re my responsibility.”
I realized I was a liability to the reputation that he had worked hard to build. My throat burned with shame and nascent tears. Instead of being wiry and strong, I felt chunky and uncoordinated, stupid and in the way. I had finally become the incompetent girlfriend. We grabbed dinner in silence. Ivan loaded the footage and I caught a glimpse. I felt a wave of self-disgust watching my own body struggle. I left the room, wrapped myself in a blanket, and texted my dad to ask for some of his old tennis advice without telling him why.
“Compete with yourself, not others,” he said.
Caring about what other people think is a blessing and a curse. Teachers and family members told me, as a child, that I was a gifted student, a good writer, a voracious reader—so I became one. Growing up around professors and poets, being an excellent academic and artist felt like my birthright. Being the only woman or brown person in a room never shook my sense of belonging.
On the flip side, I always wanted to be an athlete but never considered myself one, even though I picked up a tennis racquet when I was eight and was playing national tournaments as a freshman. In the water, I wanted excellence but instead imagined ridicule—or worse, disgust—from other surfers. I sometimes wondered if being like them was even what I really wanted. I didn’t want to neglect who I was in hopes of trying to be someone I could never be.
It was often all in my head. No surfer likely gave a second thought to my waves when they each had their insecurities to reckon with. The day after Pupukea, I went to practice my crowd navigation at Chun’s, a break with a chaotic soup of both beginners and skilled locals. I handled my board well: what had seemed like a huge problem turned out to be something I could solve in a single session.
The coming weeks brought new challenges to the ego. Ivan and I went out on a day at Sunset beach with overhead waves, where I paddled for my life to make it over incoming walls of water and towed him to shore when his leash broke at dusk. A few days later, I mistimed a shorebreak at Kammieland and was slammed onto the beach in front of everyone, peeling a large, bloody swatch of skin off my knee. Ivan offered to take me home, but I balked at the suggestion. I made him go back out to surf and drove myself in anger and embarrassment.
I moved out of Honolulu and to a North Shore studio across the street from V-land and settled into a rhythm, focusing on one skill at a time. I started to recognize the locals—the kind-eyed paddleboarder with a pepper-speckled man bun, the blonde mom who shredded a teal shortboard, and a few star groms from across the street. I came to enjoy the sensation of wiping out, tumbling in the water with nothing to do but relax my mind and body. I emerged from each session with a few new scrapes, and realizations that I scrawled into the back of my journal. Even the worst sessions were accompanied by the simple beauty of being in the ocean alongside a rainbow or a sea turtle.
The most sacred time in the water was at dusk right after sunset, when everyone else had paddled back to shore. It was the only time I waited for waves at their peak, which I usually deferred to other surfers, and I often experienced breakthroughs. One evening, after a session of nosedives as I failed to trim and turn into waves, only Ivan and I were left in the water. I looked back, saw a glassy ramp, and paddled as hard as I could. To my shock, I caught it at the perfect spot, cutting diagonally across the dark green wave face on the longest ride I had ever had. I went down wave after wave until the sky and sea merged into one black expanse, unable to help laughing in joy.
Part of not fashioning myself in relief to others feels like figuring out what I am. I fall fast and hard for new activities but sometimes I wonder if, in the process, I neglect the things I’m not an imposter at. Learning to surf—or climb, ski, or dive—all remains a negotiation between my natural excitement for the outdoors, my fear of relative incompetence, and the time I spent doing things I already value, like writing or building things.
The journey continues to see-saw. This summer, I was walking uphill at night with three shirtless guys in southern California, with a surfboard tucked under my arm. Earlier that evening, I had caught my first wave on a shortboard. Even just a few months ago, the vision would’ve felt absurd, and I couldn’t help laughing out loud.
My first week back on the North Shore, however, has felt like starting all over again. I caught one wave in two hours during my first session back at V-land and exited the water near tears of frustration. The thought that helps me transcend is this: if I can’t surf, I can learn. I wouldn’t call myself a surfer, but I am closer to seeing myself as someone who can be.
This piece has been in the works for months. Thanks to Ivan for being an invaluable friend, surf buddy, and reader. Thanks Jeff, for helping inspire my surfing and for always believing I’d make it into the ocean someday. Thanks to Nadia, Erin, Adam, Laura, Alice, and Peter for reading this and sharing color from your own surf experiences. And of course, to Zoe, Katherine, Ally, Blake, Lani, Kiley, Alex, and my family for knowing me well and reminding me to focus on the joy and look at myself with a kinder gaze.