All It Took was The Worst Year of My Life

Or, "Toilet Saddam"

Hi everyone - I’ve been beyond happy to see how much you all are enjoying the excerpts of It’s Only Drowning. (And, of course, by how many of you have told me that after reading them, you decided to buy the book.)

So with that in mind, I wanted to pick up from where we left off in Chapter One. I’ll overlap a bit, just to lead you in, and if you want to read the full beginning to the first chapter you can find it here.

If my book hadn’t been published this week, I’d be writing about the awful Supreme Court decision that came down this morning. In a way, though, I think what you’re about to read is about what many of us might be feeling as we read the news right now - a sense of powerlessness in a world that seems to be spinning out of control.

So I hope this helps. What you’re about to read is not just the most vulnerable part of the book, it’s most vulnerable thing I’ve ever written. But I felt it was important to be open about what I went through, because maybe it will help readers who are going through something similar. Remember: you can text or call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline any time at 988. And if you wondering whether you might need help, don’t wait to ask for it.

Okay, here’s the second excerpt from Chapter One. And with just over 24 hours until the end of this make-or-break launch week, if you haven’t bought the book yet, I’m hoping you’ll pick a copy today. Thank you again, and hope you enjoy reading!

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To the extent I thought, I wish I’d tried it, surfing was just another scribble on the map of roads not taken. I should have learned to surf. Who cares?

The answer, as it turned it out, was me. Enormously.

And all it took to realize it was the worst year of my life.

***

When I was four years old, I was terrified—absolutely terrified—that Saddam Hussein would emerge from my toilet and strangle me.

This was during the first Gulf War, so my fear was rational, assuming you knew, as I did, the rules governing Saddam’s behavior. First, he lurked in the pipes. Second, he could travel instantly between rooms and even buildings, so long as he remained submerged. Third, while Saddam could overpower any child whose bathroom he invaded, he couldn’t escape the plumbing on his own. Only the emptying of a toilet bowl would release him.

I never told an adult about the danger. Even at four, I understood grown-ups were unlikely to believe me. Nor did I stop flushing; I suspected adults would frown upon that, too. Instead, for the duration of the war, and (just to be on the safe side) for several months after it ended, I did what any reasonable person would do: I flushed and ran.

I bring this up for context: I have always taken current events a bit personally.

For most of my childhood, that was a good thing. Born halfway through the 1980s, I formed my first memories as the Berlin Wall fell and spent my youth as a fortunate son of the world’s sole superpower. Growing up, I knew—everyone I knew knew—that America was good and getting better and everywhere else was getting more like America. Demographers call us the millennials. In truth, I belong to the greatest-expectations generation. We flew closest to the sun.

And then? September 11; the Great Recession; the Trump era; a million smaller, yet previously unimaginable crises in between. A towering lasagna of calamity. As people my age entered our thirties, the problems we were supposed to be on our way to solving—mass shootings, income inequality, racial prejudice, climate change—all seemed to be getting worse instead of better. Rather than staying vanquished, the villains of the twentieth century—Nazis and white supremacists and Russian tyrants—returned with a vengeance.

As if this weren’t brutal enough, for us, young adulthood did not fade gradually. It was snatched away by the worst pandemic in one hundred years.

By the standards of people living through a global catastrophe, Jacqui and I were the lucky ones. Health intact. Family safe. Jobs we could do remotely. No children to enroll in Zoom school. We even had a refuge from the heat and humidity of the nation’s capital, where we were living when Covid hit. The first summer after buying our Asbury Park cottage, we’d rented it to vacationers from New York City, but by the second summer the world was on fire and we rented it to ourselves. Jacqui gardened. I grilled. At first, I actually kind of liked it.

And then I fell apart. Despite my good fortune—and despite being from a generation used to pinballing between crises—Covid felt different. Maybe it was the scale. Maybe it was the isolation, or the fact that the pandemic arrived as I approached my thirty-fifth birthday. Maybe it was the variants that pulled the rug of normalcy out from under us, even after the release of a vaccine.

Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a pandemic. Good for him. I bought a PlayStation and drank lots of wine. Every so often, in increasingly urgent tones, Jacqui would suggest I pick up a hobby. But I already had a hobby: reading the news and worrying. By the fall of 2021, a perfect storm of growing certainties—that Covid was not an event but an era, that Trumpism was not a blip but a spreading stain, that a world on fire was not a challenge to be overcome but a permanent condition to be endured for the rest of our lives—began cycling endlessly through my head.

Psychologists call this “situational depression,” meaning it was due to circumstances rather than brain chemistry. But that was hardly comforting when the world had become one big situation. Night after night I lay awake in a frozen frenzy. Was I wasting my life? Was humanity hurtling toward extinction? Were Jacqui and I waiting too long to have kids? Was I doomed, if we did have kids, to be a sad dad who mopes around, worrying he’s wasted his life and that humanity is hurtling toward extinction?

I would say it was like running on a treadmill, but that would imply health and fitness. It was more like being a treadmill, spinning in circles while getting repeatedly stomped on. Regardless of the subject of my panic—the planet, the country, my life—I arrived at the same conclusion: The best was over. There was nowhere to go but down.

My spiral was privileged and high-functioning. Few of my friends knew what was going on below the surface. I never stopped working weekends. But the faith that had lifted me out of previous low moments—that what I did mattered—now seemed naïve.

As far as I could tell, only three categories of people made it through Covid without succumbing to despair: happy warriors, pathological narcissists, and Taylor Swift. Many of my friends in DC fell into the first group. So did my wife. Jacqui was working as a legislative director for a congressman, and I admired her ability to fight the good fight. But the courage displayed by her and my DC friends no longer made sense to me. It struck me as a form of denial.

So did the narcissism of the narcissists. They seemed to experience the same crushing realization I did, that the world was full of chaos and time was running out. But instead of responding rationally, with depression, they tried to overturn elections or committed cryptocurrency fraud or purchased entire social networks just to maintain the illusion of control. They were hardly role models. Yet I was impressed by their relentlessness.

Why is it, I wondered, that so many of the world’s worst people have no trouble getting off the couch?

This was the kind of question I pondered while lying on my couch. It would be easy to say I was stuck in a rut. But that doesn’t capture the gravitational pull of hopelessness, the twisted comfort that comes from wrapping oneself in a blanket of gloom. I felt stuck in a tar pit, at once static and frantic, sinking deeper into despair.

I remained lucky in one crucial respect: I never seriously considered harming myself. But I came close. One morning in early 2022, I left our Victorian cottage, stepped onto the tracks running through town, and saw, in the distance, an oncoming NJ Transit locomotive. For just a moment, I paused and faced the train.

It's not for me, I thought. But I get the appeal.

My brother-in-law, meanwhile, was thriving. I couldn’t understand it. Matt was neither a warrior, a narcissist, nor Taylor Swift. Yet the second year of the pandemic—the same year I slid deeper into depression—was the most successful of Matt’s life. New Yorkers fled the city for the Shore, and he made a killing fixing lights in their guest bedrooms and installing charging stations for their Teslas. Before long, he’d started his own company and bought a house in Brick, a blue-collar exurb in New Jersey’s small but passionate Trump Country.

Matt referred to his new hometown, affectionately, as “Bricktucky.” This was one of a million things I might not have even noticed pre-pandemic, and that now felt like an example of everything wrong with him and also the entire world. As recently as 2019, our differences in taste hadn’t meant much. He drove a Dodge Ram; I drove a Subaru. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Lizzo. He was a Joe Rogan superfan; I was a Stephen Sondheim aficionado. So what? Now, though, our preferences were more than preferences. They were identifiers, declaring not just what we liked but who we were. The growing divide between Matt and me wasn’t partisan, since he still hadn’t registered to vote. But we’d nonetheless been drafted into opposite sides of the culture war.

The deepest divide was, of course, vaccination. Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, Jacqui and I probably would have cut off contact after learning he’d refused the Covid shot. As it was, we came up with excuses (“He’s an introvert”; “He works in empty houses”; “He doesn’t eat in restaurants anyway”) to justify not taking a firmer stand. Afraid of the blow-up that would result, I never confronted him about his decision, and because failing to confront him felt like a betrayal of principles, I didn’t speak much to him at all. On the increasingly rare and always outdoor occasions when I saw him, we exchanged clipped, awkward snippets.

“Work’s been good?”

“Meh.”

“Mrmm.”

Yet the fact remained: at the moment I judged Matt more harshly than ever, he was doing better than ever. I wasn’t sure where his inner strength came from. But I couldn’t help wondering if what I’d dismissed as his recklessness—the loose screw that compelled him to zoom down the Parkway on his Harley or handle live wires for a living or float on a fiberglass plank in a freezing ocean—was in fact fearlessness, driving him forward when I was stuck.

The days got longer, which helped. I began seeing a therapist over Zoom. That helped, too. Still, as spring turned to summer, Matt remained on track while I stayed stuck in my tar pit.

And then, on June 14, 2022, I opened the door to Glide, a surf shop in Asbury Park.

Looking back, it seems impossible that this was a coincidence. At a moment when Matt was blooming and I was wilting, was it really random chance that I decided to try his favorite hobby? Did it not occur to me, even subconsciously, that surfing was the one thing he enjoyed that I could, in the far reaches of my imagination, picture myself enjoying, too?

I dunno. But at the time, it felt random to me. I didn’t walk into Glide planning to one day surf with my brother-in-law. How could I have? We were barely speaking. I just wanted to do something new at a time when it took enormous effort to do anything at all. So, I bought a wetsuit. I asked the young woman behind the counter, a curly-haired brunette named Katie, if she knew someone who could teach me to surf. And when she said, “I could?” I ignored the question mark in her voice and scheduled a lesson for later that week.

At the time, I imagined learning to surf would be a fun but manageable challenge, like learning a language. It was only later—after being stung by jellyfish and run over by ill-tempered youth; after being flung through the air by waves the size of shipping crates and paddling out in near-freezing winter swells; after, with my brother-in-law watching from the beach, executing what can only be described as a bellyflop, but for testicles—that I revised my view.

Learning to surf is like learning a language that wants to kill you. With the sole exception of being a person in the world in the late-early twenty-first century, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.

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As always, if you want to leave an early review, ask a question about the writing process, or just share the best way to avoid dictators emerging from your toilet, leave a comment. I love reading them.

And thanks again for making this book launch so terrific - even in such crazy times.

David