The Motion of the Ocean
The Motion of the Ocean
Gender, the devastating allure of the sea, and romanticizing survival
I’ve been spending a lot of time this summer by the Atlantic ocean. There are very few things that I find as entrancing as watching the tides go in and out as they transform from gently lapping at the shore to slamming the rocky coast with a ferocity that shakes my bones.
I think in another life I could have been a sailor. Or maybe not a sailor and all the cultural associations therein, but a person who sails. Sylvia Plath once expressed a similar sentiment, but for a completely different reason; mainly a social one and a feminist critique
Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
My ideal view of sailing has always been an isolated one. Maybe that’s because I watched too many movies of lone castaways on lifeboats and romanticized their brute dedication to survival and self-reliance. In a way, Plath’s sentiment and mine aren’t too far off from each other in our subconscious desire to exist outside of a system. Her’s to escape the confines of femininity and disappear inside of the patriarchy, and mine to escape from the pressures of society all together. It’s all so complicated.
These lonesome survival stories are often places of refuge for people who have survived trauma. Their straightforwardness and unflinching focus for me feels safe, even though it’s the opposite.
For a long time my life was about survival, about beating breast cancer. The cacophony of every other previously important part of my life suddenly ceased, and in it’s place was the rhythmic thrumming of a war drum, as I rowed to the rhythm of the drugs, the hospital, my appetite.
Living as a woman, much of my headspace had been consumed by my presentation– my performance of my gender: my long blonde hair, my skin-care and makeup routine, following fashion trends, and accentuating certain aspects of my body. When these performances didn’t align the price I paid was crippling self-esteem issues. But during cancer treatment, the performances couldn’t align. My long blonde hair fell out in clumps, my perfect skin broke-out in blemishes, fatigue destroyed any semblance of a thoughtfully curated wardrobe or make-up routine I could muster.
Suddenly much of the pressures of being a woman were gone, along with my period and my perfect (if I do say so myself) breasts. What was left was a genderless, expressionless human just trying to survive.
Looking back on it in some perverse way it was freeing. It was freeing to jump out of the shower, run a towel across my head and be done with it because I had bigger fish to fry, and who gives a shit?
But now that’s over. My skin is clear, my hair is long enough to pull back into a ponytail and here I am again spending an hour blow-drying it with a round-brush because otherwise it frizzes out and looks like a mullet, and not in a good way. Here I am again spending way too much money on toners and serums because I’m about to turn 30 and that means I’m old as shit (sarcasm, but like actually I do buy retinol for some reason).
I hit resume on my performance, but this time I have a deeper understanding of what it’s like not to perform, and just to survive. Why is life so complicated? Why can’t I just ship out to sea and forget what I look like because I’m too busy scraping barnacles of the hull of my ship?
My conscious, thinking brain tells me it’s not one or the other. Gender performance is not superfluous, but a tool of expression, just like me writing this substack is a way for me to express myself. Also, just surviving is horrible and no way to life life. Why does my search for simplicity manifest as a longing for the most painful days of my life?
It’s because I heard the beating of the waves against the rocks, and they were predicable in their brutality. Other people often surprise me with their subtle cruelty. The other day I rode my bike into Davis Square to buy some lunch. Two women were sitting nearby and watched me lock up my bike. “Why are her leggings so high?” one said (really loudly if I might add), the other responded “Well it’s clear she needs the support.” and they giggled.
In that moment I wished my bike was a sailboat I could charter out alone, unable to be perceived, no audience to perform for…that my appearance didn’t matter to me as much as it does. To disappear–not into a scene, as Ms. Plath envisions, but apart from the stage all together, into the alluring embrace of the sea.