Hope Theory

Last Sunday at roughly three in the afternoon I was puking my guts out over the side of a dive boat forty minutes off the northwest coast of Key West, twenty feet above North America’s only barrier reef.  

Well, somewhere between 17 and 23 feet above the reef at any given moment. The swells were roughly three feet high and we were getting tossed around pretty hard, the aluminum air tanks crashing into one other along the sides of the boat even though they were bungeed in. The ride out hadn’t been too bad. Lumpy, but not terribly so. The water was clear and gorgeous and the salt air was in our faces as we sped from the dock through the bight and cruised out into open water, past Wisteria Island and Sunset Key (Oprah has a house there. It is not hard to guess which one it is). I was feeling good as I strapped on my gear. The whole ride out I’d been shooting the shit with my dive buddy John, who’d been underwater in all the places your dive instructors tell you to someday get underwater: Indo, the Gulf of Thailand, Milford Sound. It was my first time diving without a pro or a group guide, and I was pretty pumped that I’d hit the random-amateur-dive-buddy jackpot. I sat down in the stern with my fins and mask on, tank strapped to my back, and waited my turn for the captain to call me to get into the water.

And as I sat there being heaved up and down in the chop, I started to feel bad.

I gripped the bench below me as the boat pitched underneath us. A mom and dad whose two kids were diving with them for the first time were standing huddled on the gunwale, each trying to convince the others to stride in first. I screwed my face into a smile in case they looked my way, but what I was thinking was, “You have fifteen seconds and then I’m pushing all of you into the effing water. JUST. GO.”

I suppressed my murder-y feelings and rising nausea long enough to hear my name called. I stood up, took a big stride in, and heard John splash close behind me. We signaled “okay” to one another and descended. “Alright,” I thought, “I’m down and out of the chop. This is fine.” And at first it was. We made our way slowly through the fingers of the reef – there were fish everywhere and the coral was spectacular. We saw an eel and two barracudas. This dive was different than any I’ve done before – we were instructed to surface twice, once after 20 minutes and again after 40. The current is strong and it’s easy to drift without noticing it. Our captain didn’t want us to get too far from the boat. So at the 20-minute and 40-minute mark, John and I surfaced to check out where we were in relation to the dive boat.

And each time we did, I found myself getting pummeled by swells that were way bigger than anything I’d been in before. We got on our backs, kicked our way a little closer to the boat, then went back down. And each time we got to the sea bottom I thought less about what I was seeing through my increasingly fogged-up mask, and more about how lousy I was starting to feel.

We surfaced for the last time just shy of the 60-minute mark and started kicking towards the mooring line so we could pull our way back to the boat. That’s when I felt my stomach cramp. I took my regulator out of my mouth and called out to John: “I don’t feel very good.”

“Keep your reg in and look down, you can puke right through it!” he said encouragingly.

I made a face.

And then I puked.

And I didn’t stop for a while. Not when I got back on the boat. Not when we got to the second dive site, which I couldn’t even think about gearing up for. Not for another couple of hours until we were out of the open ocean and nearly home. It. Was. Brutal.

We docked just before 5:30pm. I gathered my things as the crew tied up the boat. I thanked them as convincingly as I could, stepped out onto the dock and was relieved to feel my stomach settle down. I’d taken about three steps toward Mallory Square on my 1.5-mile walk home when the skies opened and torrential rains the likes of which I’ve never seen started coming down. For a few minutes I huddled under the awning of a closed rum distillery, “We’ll sanitize you inside and out!” finger painted on the window, until it became clear this wasn’t a passing shower. So I started walking. About a half hour later I got home. Drenched. A little unsteady on my feet. Willing to give my very last dime for a shower, a toothbrush, and a 7pm bedtime. One question circled my still-wave-tossed brain: What am I doing?

I hadn’t really wanted to go diving that day. I’d been working on a new project at home all morning and was just getting into a groove an hour or so before I had to leave to walk to the boat. My friends were going to drag brunch that afternoon at our favorite local bar, and I kind of wanted to do that instead. The wind had been up all day; I knew the water was going to be choppy. From the time I put on my suit and half a bottle of sunscreen to the moment I got to the dock and saw our boat being tossed back and forth in waters as calm as we were going to see for the next four hours, I had the same thought – I don’t really want to do this.

But I went. I went because I’d told everybody that I was gonna go scuba diving down here. That was one of the “points” of being in Key West. I went because I wanted to prove that this is an activity that I do for me. Even though the reason I started a year and a half ago was because the guy I was dating was a cave diver, and I was going to prove that – unlike anyone else he’d ever been with – I could do that with him. I could keep up. I went because I love the things that diving represents. It’s adventurous. Physical. Challenging. A little badass. A little risky. It’s a view of the world not everybody gets to see. It checks all of the boxes.

…Shouldn’t I like this?

I was sitting in bed last Sunday night before I went to sleep, eating a handful of water crackers to start replacing a day’s worth of food left at sea, thinking of something my career coach Steve said to me a few weeks back. He told me about “Hope Theory.” The premise of Hope Theory is that there are multiple pathways that lead to any one goal. As long as your goal is rooted in your values – the feelings and beliefs that are most meaningful to you – you don’t have to worry if you fail in an attempt to accomplish it. You just have to find another path. You need will power and way power. Don’t lose hope. And in the moments where you start to feel really anxious or fundamentally lost (hello, 2019), it’s because you’re striving towards a goal that doesn’t match your values. Keep the values – re-set the goal.

So ever since last weekend I’ve done something that’s new to me down here: I’ve been riding my bicycle. It came with the house we rented. It is turquoise blue and rusty. It has big fat tires and wide handlebars. You pedal backwards to hit the brakes. It does not seem anything like scuba diving. A small child would have no problem riding it. It is not adventurous or cool or risky.

But to me it is.

When I got down here I hadn’t ridden a bike in thirty years. It wasn’t really a thing I did as a kid, and definitely not as a teenager. The idea of learning to ride on a road bike alongside traffic on the streets of Boston is downright laughable. And so it’s always been this weird, kind of embarrassing fear I’ve had for a super long time. I’m a fit, competitive, pretty competent athlete, who wasn’t sure she could ride a bike.

Every day down here, at least once, I get on my bike and cruise around. Sometimes I take it to the Starbucks on the far side of the island. Other times I take it to the corner store (the basket fits a day’s worth of groceries and a 12-pack) or down to the pier for sunset. But more often than not I just ride it around and explore. Key West is tiny – seven square miles. On my bike I can make it from the Southernmost Point to the mansions near Mallory Square, then take side streets down to the far side of the island where they keep the pawn shops and checks-cashed-here storefronts out of site of the tourists. I still have to concentrate when I take a ninety-degree turn. I hold my breath when a car or truck goes by. And…it’s awesome. It feels new and exciting. I get a view of my little world that’s different and bigger than I could get if I were just on foot. And, I think, it’s been helping me carve a new path – no wider than its big fat tires – that helps me experience a lot of the things that have always been really important to me. And every time I strap on my awesome new bike helmet that Keith got me, I get the exact same feeling: I can’t wait to go.