Saltwater Therapy
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
The layoff came on a Tuesday that felt like every other Tuesday, which was perhaps the cruelest part. No fanfare, no dramatic weather—just the slow, bureaucratic dismantling of what I'd thought was my life's work. One moment I was a design director with meetings and deadlines and the comfortable weight of responsibility; the next I was another casualty of corporate efficiency, my desk cleared, my access revoked, my professional identity severed as cleanly as a surgeon's cut.
I'd been surfing for twenty years, long enough for the ritual to become involuntary. The drive to the beach, the wax on the board, the paddle out: these were movements my body knew even when my mind couldn't focus on anything but the endless scroll of job postings and the mounting stack of rejection emails. In those first weeks after the layoff, I found myself at the water almost daily, not out of joy but out of something closer to desperation.
There's a particular kind of disorientation that comes with sudden unemployment, especially when you're old enough to have mortgage payments and young enough to still believe in your own invincibility. It's the disorientation of explaining to your spouse why you're home at 2 PM on a Wednesday, of avoiding certain friends whose sympathy feels like pity, of lying awake at 3 AM wondering if you've somehow become obsolete without realizing it.
But the waves don't care about your resume. They don't care about your LinkedIn profile or your portfolio or the fact that you haven't had a callback in three weeks. They rise and break with the same indifference they've shown for millions of years, and there's something almost religious about submitting to that rhythm.
I remembered reading about a program in Southern California where surfers worked with combat veterans, using the ocean as therapy for PTSD. The idea had seemed almost too California-mystical when I first encountered it, but now I understood. The water strips away everything nonessential. In the lineup, there's no past or future, no career trajectory or five-year plan. There's only the next wave, the next breath, the next moment of staying upright or getting hammered by the sea.
A surfer friend of mine had been through his own layoff six months earlier in the same industry, facing the same brutal market, the same slow grind of applications and interviews that led nowhere. He'd found work eventually, but he still surfed with the intensity of someone who'd learned not to take stability for granted. We'd paddle out together in the gray dawn light, trading waves and war stories, comparing notes on the particular psychology of rejection.
"It's like learning to surf all over again," he said one morning, watching a set roll through. "You forget how to read the waves, how to position yourself. Everything feels wrong until suddenly it doesn't."
The metaphor was obvious, almost embarrassingly so, but that didn't make it less true. Job hunting, like surfing, is mostly about timing and patience and the ability to keep trying after you've been worked over. You paddle for waves you don't catch, sit through lulls that feel endless, get tumbled by forces entirely beyond your control. Most of the time, you're just trying not to drown.
But sometimes, and this is the part that keeps you coming back, everything aligns. The wave approaches at the perfect angle, you're in exactly the right position, and suddenly you're not fighting the water anymore but riding it, carried forward by something vast and powerful and utterly indifferent to your small human struggles. Those moments of grace, rare as they are, make all the wipeouts worthwhile.
I started to think of my job search in the same terms. Each application was like paddling for a wave—most would pass me by, some would dump me unceremoniously, but eventually, if I kept showing up, one would lift me up and carry me forward. The key was not to take the rejections personally, not to let them convince me that I was somehow broken or unwanted.
The ocean taught me this, or maybe reminded me of what I'd always known but had forgotten in the comfortable years of steady employment. Humility, patience, the ability to get back up after being knocked down: these weren't just surfing skills but life skills, and I'd let them atrophy during the years when everything came easily.
Months after the layoff, I got an offer! The kind of wave you dream about when you're sitting through endless flat spells. A chance to join a crew of design leaders who'd been riding their own perfect barrels for years, who recognized something in me that felt like coming home to myself. It was the kind of opportunity that makes all the close-outs and hold-downs feel like necessary preparation. I'll share the details once everything's official, but the right wave finally found me.
I still surf several times a week, but now it's different. Less desperate, more grateful. The waves haven't changed, but I have. I've learned again what I knew as a kid but had somehow forgotten: that the ocean will teach you everything you need to know about resilience, if you're willing to listen. That sometimes the best therapy is the simplest: salt water, morning light, and the endless possibility of the next wave.
The job market is still brutal, and I know how quickly things can change in this industry. But I'm not afraid of it anymore, not the way I was. I know now that I can handle the wait, can keep paddling even when the waves aren't coming. Because they always do, eventually. You just have to be ready when they arrive.
And when you find yourself on one of those perfect waves, the kind that lifts you up and carries you exactly where you need to go, you don't waste time worrying about the next wipeout. You stay present, feel every shift in the water beneath you, use everything you've learned to ride each change as it comes. These moments of grace are too rare and too beautiful to spend anywhere but fully in the flow, completely alive to the gift of right now.
