It was a very foggy morning, one that I will never forget. The fog that slumbers in the northern peninsula of Washington is nothing compared to the fog I have complained about at home in Minnesota. Even with the fog lights on in our family car, we still had trouble making out the road. We stopped at a rest stop, where mom and dad studied one of the several fold-out maps of Washington they had picked up in some gas station along the way. 

While they studied the map, I discovered a worn-down trail by the edge of the parking lot and started out on it. The trees here looked just like the ones from home, but the air was cleaner and smelled of sea salt. My feet hardly made a sound on the trail, except for an occasional squash from a puddle. The grass and moss of the damp forest was a wet carpet, which didn’t help the fact that my feet were already drenched. About a mile down the trail, I started to hear it. Something inside me shifted, and I felt the little kid in me tell me that I needed to get there faster. So I began to run. Finally, I reached a decline in the trail, and at the bottom, the grass of the forest turned into sand. I peered out in front of me and there it was.

The sea.

I always thought of the sea as blue. How silly it is to assign one color to something that is always shifting. As I gazed out toward the horizon over the ocean, it seemed as black as a moonless night. However, down at my feet where the waves come reaching up to tickle my toes, I noticed it was opaque. Out far from shore it was a dark navy before it crashed white against the rocks.

Slowly the waves came in, they always do, and brought with them unexpected treasures. As I wandered along the shoreline, I found a perfect sand dollar. A smooth piece of driftwood. A broken shell. A locket. I had an impulse to tuck each of these away into my jacket and take them back home with me, but I resisted the urge. I stared at them for a while, burning them into my memory. They belonged to the sea now.

•          •          •

I walked out of high school on the last day of junior year with my mother’s words of wisdom ringing in my ear; “This is the beginning of your lasts. Make sure you have fun with your friends and do everything you want to get done before everyone gets swept away with the excitement of a perfect senior year.”

Perfect wasn’t a choice for me.

I remember in 5th grade when we had a huge project in the spring. It was worth 400 points, which seemed like a huge amount to a 12-year-old. I spent months preparing a poster and making it my mission to memorize 300 facts about my topic. The night before we presented it I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the basement and stayed up all night finding new issues with my poster board. My mother came downstairs in the morning to find me amid a pile of paper scraps and note cards trying to find things wrong with my poster. That day I received a near perfect score. But it wasn’t perfect. Later that evening I came home and cried for hours. This was the first time my mother was able to see the internal battle her young girl was fighting.

I wish I could say I found ways to cope with perfectionism in high school, but harder classes and the looming thought of graduation only made it worse. When it came time for finals each trimester, I would find myself up in the early hours of the morning trying to squeeze a few more facts into my brain. The last trimester of my junior year in high school was the breaking point for me, as I had a goal of a perfect report card. When I didn’t receive it, my anxiety skyrocketed and I found the thought of sleep all but erased from my mind.

I needed a change of pace. My mother wasn’t blind to my struggles and tried to find different ways to help me with my obsession with perfection. When some forms of medication didn’t work we tried yoga and meditation. Before bed each night I would take melatonin supplements, but after a while, my body grew tolerant to them. Finally, my father brought up the idea of a family trip. He was a big outdoors guy and believed in the healing powers of nature. So we packed our bags and set out to the destination of my choice: the Washington coast.

•          •          •

After I gazed at the waves several minutes, I finally tore myself from the shoreline and wandered back to the rest area, where we piled into the car and began to drive down the coastline highway. I never let the sea leave my sight. We eventually came to the small town on the Washington coast named Forks. We found two available small cabins at a family-owned resort on the edge of town by the sea and decided this was the spot.

Halfway through the night, I awoke suddenly. I could hear the waves through the open windows in the cabin. The waves were a spell, calling me. I pulled on my sweatshirt and made my way out the back door toward the sea.

I was not very accustomed to the sea yet, but tonight I knew it was trying to say something. I sat on an old piece of driftwood for a while watching the waves come in and out. In and out. In and out. There was a rhythm, a heartbeat, but an irregular one.

The sea is free. Each wave comes of its own accord and doesn’t always fall perfectly. One wave would consume the other, and they would both roll back into the depths. Others came several moments after the other. You could try to tell them, “No wait, it’s not your turn yet,” but I’m guessing they wouldn’t listen. And why would they? Who are you to tell something so beautiful and free that it needs to change to be perfect?

What if there was such a thing as perfect, but it didn’t fit my definition? What if perfect described something flawed, yet someone chose to see it as the best version it could be? It wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t perfect to anyone else, just yourself.

I do not know how long I sat there. The stars made their paths across the sky, and I listened to the waves. They sang a soothing lullaby to me, one that I will never be able to recite. Slowly, I found myself wandering toward the water’s edge. My arm outstretched, reaching. A thought came to my head, and I started to wade out into the waves. As I stood waist deep in the shallows, the waves slowly came in and out. In and out. In and out. As the dark blues of the horizon turned to a light violet, I realized that some lessons couldn’t be learned from school textbooks or our parents. No, these have to be taught instead by something else. The waves lulled in and out, and a sudden peace fell over me.

The beginning rays of light began to glint upon the water, the purple sky turning to a vibrant orange. The sea seemed to hold its breath for a brief moment as the sun finally peeked over the horizon. Then the waves continued, showing the way to something deeper than the surface.