After Broken Head

by Rebecca Olive, Kurungabaa, Volume 1, Issue 2, July 2008 > Download (PDF)

I swim up through the remnants of whitewater and pull on my legrope to find my board. I grab it and get back on, paddling straight back out toward the break. A few seconds in, I remember how strong the current is and start to pull harder through the water…My arms are already burning and I’m trying to use my stomach and back to paddle. Argh! This sucks.

I want to be strong, I want to be fast through the water and I curse my pathetic arms, my small shoulders and my weak stomach. I curse my body that remains, and will always remain, so new to surfing, to this action of moving through the ocean water and currents. A youth spent dancing and walking and travelling and reading has built and conditioned my mind and my legs, but my surfing body feels weak and small and not up to the task. Fuck this! I’m going in and walking back around.
I walk through the waves until there’s a break in the set and I jump back on my board and paddle hard. I struggle to keep my mind low in my body. Instead it jumps to my shoulders making my centre of gravity high, dancing above the water, not within it.

Surfing. I’m still learning to pull and stretch and grimace and throw myself around in my turns and to risk taking off on a wave that scares me, and to become comfortable with the speed in the water. A ballet-filled childhood that developed my sense of aesthetics and a need to make things look easy and smooth and in form, is not always so useful here in this space, in this time. I need to learn to growl and crawl and roll and twist and fall and be human – an unconsciousness that reminds me more of sex than dancing. Don’t think, just do. An experience built on body memory and feeling and intuition and not, as with so many other things I’ve been able to achieve in my life, on thinking and being clever. It challenges everything that I know.

And I like it.

It’s commitment, it’s time in the water, and it’s patience, losing your ego, laughing at yourself, listening, regressing. It’s yelling and laughing and dancing and swimming and sinking. It shits me and it makes me mad – screaming at the sky, splashing at the water, feeling like an idiot, mad! Surfing has made my body something new and something that does things. My arms, my legs, my back and chest have purpose and function and that’s an idea that I’m still getting used to. But it makes me feel human. All the pain and frustration burns in my muscles and my head and reminds me that I am a body and that I exist and that I can make things happen.

So I paddle back out. I struggle and I swear and I get smashed and I freak out, because I can’t imagine not doing it. Because these experiences, these feelings make my body mine to enjoy (or smash) instead of something that is decorative, or that tells a story for someone else to take pleasure in.

It makes my body free.

A wave forms in front of me. My head says ‘move, move, move’ and my body responds, but not because it looks nice and not because it feels good, but because if I don’t, then nothing will happen. I’ll just be sitting in the water, waiting for something.

– Rebecca Olive