This summer, I began to engage in a secret ritual. In the wee, dark hours of morning, I would rise from my bed and drive to Malibu, a short 20 minutes before rush hour. There, I would park on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, pull on a wetsuit, shoulder a surfboard down to the water, and paddle out as the sun rose. Surfers call this dawn patrol.
This summer, I began to engage in a secret ritual. In the wee, dark hours of morning, I would rise from my bed and drive to Malibu, a short 20 minutes before rush hour. There, I would park on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, pull on a wetsuit, shoulder a surfboard down to the water, and paddle out as the sun rose. Surfers call this dawn patrol.
Let me be clear: I am a beginner. The question I am most frequently asked out in the water is: “Are you okay?” But something about the solitude of my mission—and probably also the wetsuit, if I’m being honest—made me feel like a f-ing superhero. My mornings crackled with excitement and electricity.
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One morning, a few weeks into this, I posted a picture of my surfboard with a timestamp on Instagram Stories—the kind that disappears within 24 hours. I didn’t regret it immediately, but I did when I opened the app later that day, and saw how many people had seen the post. I share a lot of things on social media, from the mundane and silly to the deeply personal, but in that moment I felt oddly exposed and realized, maybe this was one thing I did not want to share. Maybe it was because I was afraid of being labeled a cliché (the New Yorker who moves to LA and tries to surf), a poser (I’m not any good), or a kook (yes, that’s a Wavestorm). Maybe I was worried my colleagues on the east coast might think I should have been working at 8:30am EST, or that I would fail publicly at something I’ve failed privately at, off and on, for years.
Or maybe, I just didn’t want to extinguish the secret magic of doing something only for myself, before anyone knew I was even awake. I didn’t post any more surfing pictures.
When my boyfriend left town for a week, I ramped up my routine, loading the car the night before, edging my alarm closer to 5am each morning, and chomping a peanut-butter slathered English muffin as I charged west on the 10 freeway. In the grey light of the early morning, I was paddling through the glassy water—and sometimes even standing up—as the waves rolled toward shore. Before the mist completely burned off and traffic started to thicken, I would peel off my wetsuit to drive back home, salty and sandy. An hour later, I was showered and online for work at the same time as always, no one the wiser.
My covert morning routine colored the rest of my day. I couldn’t decide if I felt like Clark Kent, or like I was having an affair. The morning mist from Malibu seemed to hang around my head, and the physical exertion left me no energy for unnecessary stress. I didn’t mind being cooped up at my desk, because I had the memory of the morning secreted away, like a seashell in my pocket.
There was no question in my mind whether I was doing it for bragging rights. No, the glee I felt was pure, unadulterated, and all my own. The joy of sharing on social media, it seems, has given rise to a new joy: the joy of not sharing on social media. Last year, I shrieked with surprise when I saw a friend’s pregnant belly at a gallery opening. It was for precisely that moment—and the many others like it—she said, that she had purposely kept her news off Facebook $META.
“It’s fashionable in the internet age to complain that no one has any secrets anymore,” wrote my colleague Sarah Todd, in a recent essay. But of course, she wrote, we all do. And in the age of oversharing, there’s something special about guarding a ritual, hobby, or endeavor solely for oneself. A secret.
Dawn patrol may have been just one of mine.
