Looking out over the ocean, I would watch the waves sparkling in the sunlight as they grew and spilled into a burst of froth. It was a fun way to relax, to breathe deep and enjoy an awesome display of energy. But lately it had become exhausting.
In winter last year I tore the lining of an artery in my neck during a rough ocean swim off the Central Coast of New South Wales. It caused a stroke while I was in the water, which saw me scrambling back to shore where a surfer noticed me and sounded the alarm. Six months later, the injury had healed, and my motor functions were all back to normal. But as I prepared for a dip in calm conditions on a sunny day in January, I paused. An unexpected journey into fear began.
Standing on the sand, a thousand scenarios would play out in my mind: how big was that wave? Was it powerful enough to injure me? Where would the currents take me? Would I be safe?
I assumed I already knew what fear felt like – I had surfed in rough conditions before, saved lives in the ocean and pursued plenty of adventure in my early years – but this was different. This was fear in the total absence of any bravado or exhilaration or reward. It did not feel like a physical challenge to surmount, it felt simply like my energy would disappear and I would sink beneath the waves.
I would stand on the shore for an age, scrunching up my eyes against the morning sun and scrutinising the conditions for so long that my face would start to ache.
The scales tipped
It started as a straightforward fear of being fearful. In the days after I left the emergency department, my thoughts revolved around: what if I saw the beach where it happened and freaked? Would I take fright the moment the chill water hit my skin? What if the sound of a crashing wave sent me back to that day? I was scared to even turn my neck to breathe when swimming freestyle. Thankfully, it turned out I loved the ocean just as before. The real fear came later. It came embedded inside fatigue.
The neurologist advised me it could take six months for post-stroke fatigue to ease. That felt like a long time. I was impatient to be out there, doing everything I did before, maybe doing it better. Pushing, pushing, pushing. I cannot express how keen I was to get back to work, to pull my bootcamp boxing gloves on again, to get stronger. But each time I tried, I was getting weaker. The scales eventually tipped: the next time I looked at a rough ocean, I felt exhausted.
Distant storms create waves, which coalesce over time and distance to form swells whose power emerges much later. Fear seemed to behave in a similar way. I had survived the initial peril, I still enjoyed the water, and I assumed healing was a linear process. I was totally wrong.
As the exhaustion built, the window for when it felt OK to go into the ocean became smaller. Over time, these narrowing criteria created a space for fear to flourish. I created more obstacles, asked myself more questions, and dived in less and less.
My fitness dimmed, my sense of heaviness grew, the ocean became strange to me.
Three lessons
I learned three lessons as I crawled my way out of this heaviness. It was in coming to terms with this strangeness, and being determined to regain the familiarity and joy of the ocean that I had to learn patience – not with others, but myself. I realised that the post-disaster euphoria of survival is just that: a fleeting moment. I also learned to build my resilience, becoming comfortable in the presence of fear. I scrutinised it like I had scrutinised the waves. I sat next to it, like a passenger on a train. I didn’t rail at God for exposing me to fear, I asked for help to fix the issues in my life and keep moving forward.
That’s where the third and most crucial lesson came in: relationship. Dealing with trauma often involves talking about it, sharing it, being honest and asking for help. The best light to shine on a trouble comes from multiple angles, from those around you who care. For men, and perhaps particularly for fathers, it is not always easy to tell your family you don’t know what’s going on and that you’re scared your life will never be the same again.
That many fathers view their role as the provider, the one who evokes stability and protection, is well known. For me there was added poignancy – one of my teenage daughters had been diagnosed with cancer two months earlier. I was needed more than ever. How profoundly selfish it would be if I took a wrong step and left my wife to deal with this alone. This year was either going to break us or bond us.
It was such an astonishingly terrible situation that we did what any family would do: we laughed. Suddenly, a comedy during a family movie night had never seemed so funny. Gallows humour echoed through my mind, and our home.
However, the kindness and the curse of this closeness was that I didn’t need to ask for help. My family already knew the score. I hadn’t really needed to make such a plea, beyond the privacy of my own prayers. I was out of practice.
Rather than getting professional guidance, help arrived through conversations with those around me, often friends from my surf club. It was counselling via community.
A fellow volunteer surf lifesaver and good friend, who was watching me agonising over the ocean conditions one day, told me recovery was vastly more about the mental game than anything physical. He was right. I needed to learn to go out when I thought I couldn’t. But how could I do that safely?
I then spoke to another mate who had suffered a surfing accident that saw him floating face down in the water with a fractured neck, unable to move or breathe until help arrived. He told me his recovery involved asking someone to paddle out for a surf alongside him.
It was patrol season and the conditions were big. I was desperate to get out there, and equally petrified of what might happen. I took a leap and asked a fellow surf lifesaver if he would join me in swimming out. I needed some backup, I admitted to him. It felt like a huge question to ask, like everyone on the beach would turn to look at me. He turned to look at me. His expression suggested it was the simplest request and said: “Sure.”
Returning to the water
Pulling on the swim fins once more and navigating the shore dump brought unhappy memories. Swimming out, my brain was screaming at me to head back. My head spun as it switched between examining each approaching wave and current, while keeping my friend in sight.
My heart was pounding but my brain was learning in the background. Doing this ocean thing had been my passion, remember? I reached the sand again and felt a sense of euphoria. I turned around and looked out over the waves. I saw them through a different lens. They didn’t look scary at all.
The second time I headed out, the panic eased slightly.
These three lessons – learning patience, building resilience and embracing relationships – became an iterative practice, fine-tuned each time they were needed. I did not move through them and then discard them. They were on repeat, sometimes used every day.
A year after the stroke, my neurologist gave me the all-clear. My risk was back to the same baseline as any other person.
I embarked on a long-held desire: to train to become a surf lifesaving jetski operator. Each weekend, during rescue scenarios designed to induce stress, I could see my confidence growing as I got the hang of to this new tool. The jetski felt akin to the lessons I had learned over the past year. It was allowing me to do things I couldn’t do before. The more I used it, the more it became a natural part of me.
Twelve months on, and the sense of exhausting struggle has dissipated. The events of that day last year had given me membership of a community of people. Those who had faced life-threatening trauma and had survived. It had not made me special, but it did change the conversations I would go on to have with a wide range of people who, in countless different scenarios, either could have died themselves, or knew someone who had. I move through life now in a different way.
Graham Russell is Guardian Australia’s deputy international editor
