All By Myself
A week at home alone with only the surf and my thoughts.
I’m ramming a Theragun into my neck and hastily scrambling to finish all the chores I said I’d finish during my week alone at home. I’m behind and three Motrin deep and can’t raise my head to look at the ceiling. The nose of my board poked this morning and sent me digging for sand crabs and an emergency acupuncture appointment. I have surfed myself into a painful Friday.
I had hoped to return to my family on Sunday with a list of accomplishments, accolades, books written, wealth and health accumulated. Stress and blood pressure lowered, body and mind improved and toned. Juiced up on self care and tube time. All my work troubles and projects organized and handled, surf shape regained. The truth hurts worse than my neck.
I thought without the duties of husband and dad present I would clear the schedule and enjoy the soft quiet of being alone. Read books, watch films, get intensely focused and inspired. Exercise, meditate, clear the fog of war that is parenthood and media business owner.
I quickly learned that nothing is louder and more obnoxious than that soft quiet of being alone. It’s excruciating — loud and miserable silence. Even at its peak, watching the Knicks come back in historic fashion with a cold beer in my hand or watching the James Bond Criterion Collection with all my work done for the day was no match for the stale air that lurked as soon as the television turned off. Who am I?
I’ve decided I have no reason to ever be left alone again. This time I was saved by surfing — which there was plenty of, it was my only salvation. Had there not been waves to run my battery each day down, the angst and turmoil I can whip up from scratch in my brain is unprecedented.
I didn’t write a book. Or a movie. I barely managed your weekly letters. I could never decide where or what to eat. I missed probably 75 percent of the meals I should have eaten and then gluttonously and greasily made up for it with silly cheeseburgers. One night I paired ravioli with french fries and paid dearly for this. I was demoted back to my late teenage years. I was lost and alone, indecisive, uncertain and aimles at the keyboard, in the world, and in my body.
It’s easy to think regaining time and focus would send one to do all the things we glamorize when locked into the diaper-changing school-drop routine of the day-to-day. But it doesn’t. You become an imposter. It is not real. It is not you. I shudder to think what might have come of me had we not just experienced a historic run of south swell.
My wife will not be receiving a fitter, more scholarly and stylish version of myself after a week of “self care” in the surf. I will arrive with more injuries than fitness. Slightly puffier and malnourished. My daughters will not witness the clarity in one’s eyes from a week of getting things done in their absence. There will be no salty sparkle despite my time in the tube. They will all however be getting their dad and husband back — a guy who learned exactly who he is without them: absolutely no one at all.—Travis Ferré
Above art: Life Painting For Myself, 1962 by David Hockney (RIP: 1937-2026)