Scared But Doing It Anyway: I Lived in Hawaii 4 Years and the Ocean Scared Me the Whole Time
Long before pools and lazy rivers and any of this channel, there was Hawaii. I lived there for four years in my thirties, not a vacation, an actual chapter of my life with an apartment and roommates and a moped and a whole daily rhythm to it. I loved being near the water there the same way I always have. And the entire time I lived there, the ocean also scared me.
Not enough to keep me off a moped headed for the beach every chance I got. Just enough that I never fully relaxed into it the way people who grew up around the ocean seem to. There’s a big difference between loving water and trusting it, and Hawaii is where I learned that difference firsthand.
That’s kind of been the story of my life, actually. Scared but doing it anyway. I want to keep experiencing new things even when I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m a little afraid the whole way through, and I think if you look closely enough at almost any interesting chapter of my life, that’s the actual engine behind it. Hawaii might be the clearest example I’ve got, so I wanted to tell you the whole thing, not just the highlight reel.
The Day a Stranger Gave Me His Surfboard
I had a favorite spot for getting some sun, and I’d ridden my moped down there with my towel and my bag like I did most days off. I was laid out, half asleep in the heat, when I noticed someone walking straight toward my towel. He stopped about ten feet away, said excuse me, and I cracked one eye open and said yes.
He asked if I wanted his surfboard.
I said no. Obviously. I didn’t even surf, and a strange man offering me a large object on a beach is exactly the kind of thing you say no to on instinct. I tried to just ignore him after that, go back to my sun, but he didn’t leave. He stood there and explained himself. Today was his last day in Hawaii. That had been his last surf session. He wasn’t about to pack a surfboard for wherever he was headed next, so if I wanted it, it was mine.
For a second I genuinely wondered if I was being pranked. Hidden camera, some kind of setup, I couldn’t figure out what else this could be. Just a guy leaving the island who didn’t want his board to go to waste. We said take care to each other, and off he went, and there was his surfboard, propped up against a park bench about ten feet from my towel like it belonged there.
I laid back down and tried to go back to my sunbathing. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that board just sitting there. I don’t surf, I told myself. That’s not really my problem. Except I also could not make myself leave a perfectly good surfboard behind on a park bench for nobody.
Walking a Surfboard Home the Hard Way
Here’s the part I hadn’t thought through when I said yes to a free surfboard: I’d ridden to the beach on my moped. There is no version of carrying a surfboard on a moped that ends well. You can’t hold it under one arm and steer with the other. You can’t lay it across the floorboard without looking like you’re smuggling a small aircraft down the highway. So I did the only thing that made sense at the time, which was try to call around for a ride.
This was Hawaii in the early nineties, so nobody had a cell phone. I found a payphone, tried a few friends and roommates who had cars, and came up empty every time. Eventually I accepted there was only one option left. I picked up the surfboard, tucked it under one arm, my beach bag over the other, and started walking home in my shorts and swimsuit cover-up.
I thought I lived a few blocks from that beach. Turns out a few blocks feels like an entirely different distance when you’re carrying a surfboard the whole way, in Honolulu heat, in flip flops.
Here’s the thing, though. From the outside, I looked exactly like a woman who’d just come from an incredible surf session. And people responded to me like that the entire walk. Guys driving by would roll their windows down and yell “howzit nalu,” which I eventually figured out meant how were the waves. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or what nalu even was in that moment, so I just yelled back the only surf word I could think of. Gnarly. Like I’d been out there catching waves all morning instead of walking a stranger’s abandoned board home on foot.
I fully committed to a role I had not earned in the slightest, and honestly, it felt kind of great.
By the time I finally made it home, my arms aching, I leaned the board up against my living room wall like it had always belonged there. My roommates started trickling in one by one, and each of them did the exact same double take, looking at the surfboard, then looking at me, then asking whose stick this was. Mine, apparently. As of that afternoon, I lived in Hawaii and owned a surfboard, and I hadn’t surfed a single day in my life.
Six Inches of Actual Surfing
Naturally, once I had a surfboard leaning against my wall, there was really only one next step, even though I was still just as scared of the ocean as I’d always been. A friend of mine knew how to surf and was patient enough to take me under his wing. He taught me the actual etiquette of it, how you’re supposed to sit out in the lineup and wait your turn between sets instead of just paddling for whatever wave you want. He showed me what a leash is for and why you want one, which turned out to matter a lot more than I expected. He talked me through waxing the board so my feet wouldn’t slide right off it.
We picked a spot in Waikiki where the waves stayed fairly flat, nothing dramatic, which in hindsight was the right call for someone as nervous about the ocean as I was. We sat together in the lull between sets while he showed me the mechanics first, paddling out, popping up, riding it in, then paddling back out to do it again. Then it was my turn.
I knew the mechanics in theory. Knowing them in theory and actually doing them turned out to be two very different things. I wiped out more times than I can count, salt water up my nose more than once, board yanking away from me every time I fell since I hadn’t quite gotten the leash figured out yet in practice. But eventually, on one attempt, I got my feet under me fast enough and rode that wave in.
For about six inches. Then I fell.
I surfed six inches of a wave in Hawaii. It counts. It was awesome. I still think about that six inches more than I probably should, honestly, because it wasn’t really about the six inches. It was about being scared of the whole ocean and getting up on a board in it anyway.
Scared, but doing it anyways: Seeing Ocean On Both Sides of the Island At Once
Living somewhere beautiful doesn’t mean you stop being scared of it. Sometimes it just gives the fear better scenery.
I went hiking one day, wanting to see more of the actual island instead of just the touristy parts I already knew. The trail wound up through what felt more like tropical jungle than any woods I’d grown up around in the Midwest, and eventually it opened up to a lookout point. When you reached it, you could turn to one side and see a valley dropping away down to the ocean. Then you could turn the other direction and see an entirely different valley doing the exact same thing, down to another stretch of that same ocean.
Standing there, I could see water on both sides of the island in a single panoramic view. That’s when it really landed for me, in a way it hadn’t before. I wasn’t just near the ocean. I was living on a small piece of land in the absolute middle of it, thousands of miles of open water between me and the next nearest place a person could stand. There was nowhere else to go if something went wrong. That realization scared me in a way I genuinely hadn’t braced for.
But you can’t live on an island and carry that thought around with you every single day, or you’d never get anything done. So I learned how to gloss over it, tuck it away somewhere, and keep living my actual life on top of it anyway.
I went snorkeling plenty of times while I was there too, and one of the best spots for it is a bay that’s actually the eroded remains of an old volcanic crater. The water inside is shallow, calm, full of coral, and the fish will practically come right up to you since the walls of the old crater shelter most of the bay from the open ocean. It’s genuinely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in the water, and I brought pretty much every friend who ever visited me there to see it for themselves.
And the entire time I floated in that gorgeous, calm water, some part of my brain never stopped clocking what I was actually floating on top of. Those volcanoes in Hawaii aren’t extinct. They’re dormant, which means quiet for now, not gone. I was swimming above a cauldron that used to be full of lava and could, theoretically, decide to be full of lava again someday.
I lived at one end of Waikiki, close enough that from my apartment window I could see clear down to the beach in one direction, up into the mountains in another, and straight across the peninsula to Diamond Head. I had actual nightmares more than once about Diamond Head erupting while I slept. Where do you even run to when you live on an island. There’s nowhere to go. You’re just there, hoping it stays dormant a while longer.
What Four Years Scared of the Ocean Taught Me
Eventually I left Hawaii after those four years, moved back to the mainland, and started doing what everyone does when island life ends. Regular life took over. I got married. I got busy with work and errands and all the things that fill up a normal week, and somewhere in the middle of all that busyness, I lost track of being someone who tried things scared just to see what would happen.
Now that I’m older and I’ve got more time again, I’ve noticed my own actual preferences pretty clearly, the ones that were quietly forming that whole time in Hawaii even though I couldn’t see it yet. I like a pool where I can see straight down to the bottom, where I know for certain there’s no whales or sharks or anything bigger than me lurking somewhere I can’t see. Even sitting out by the calm little pond behind my house here in Florida, ducks paddling around like nothing in the world could go wrong, I’m still listening. Florida water means alligators are always a possibility, and I never once assume they’re not back there. Old habits, I suppose. Or maybe just good instincts I picked up a long time ago in a different kind of water.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The actual through-line of my life hasn’t changed one bit since that afternoon on the beach when Steve handed me a surfboard I had no business taking. Scared but doing it anyway. That’s still exactly how I move through things, whether it’s a real ocean, a fast lazy river at a theme park, or just showing up somewhere brand new at 65 with absolutely no idea what I’m doing yet, camera rolling, hoping it works out.
It usually does, by the way. Even the six inches count.
If any of this sounds like your own life too, the trying new things even though you’re a little terrified part, I want you to know I’m right there with you. Come float with me.
Read about how and why I started this crazy blog and YouTube channel, or continue to read about the secrets I’ve lived with my whole life.