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On September 19th, I turned 26 years old. I feel pretty good about that age given that I spent my birthday with a dude who is probably closing in on his first century and a half of life:



I had never seen a sea turtle before, and swimming with the handful hanging out on the reefs was an unreal experience. Much of scuba diving is difficult for me to communicate without grasping at the word "unreal." The nature of the sport is obviously contrary to everything humans were meant to do, and the environment underwater is thoroughly alien. I descended early on this dive and saw the first turtle, about 15 meters under, while everyone else still bobbed a few meters below the surface. After a few seconds of frantic gyrating and hopeless gesturing and desperate slammings of my palm on my fist in an effort to get everyone's attention, I settled down and just watched. That's what you're supposed to do underwater.



One of the strangest aspects of watching these animals -- once you wrap your head around the reality of their monstrous size -- is witnessing the ease with which they negotiate the water. It seems self-evident that a sea turtle would handle itself gracefully in the sea, and indeed it does, but watching it do so is still a bizarre experience. A sea turtle looks not entirely unlike a toothless, obese paraplegic encased in an iron lung. How does this gargantuan animal, with stubby legs and a ton of shell on its back, swim?



But it does.

Katie, Jenny and I spent the beginning of Idul Fitri on Bunaken, an island in northern Sulawesi, where we dove, drank Bintangs, and spoke Bahasa to the crew at Daniel's Homestay. This dive should have been my second of the day but I had abandoned the first early. During the morning dive, my ears, which have been notoriously problematic for me, refused to equalize and I had to resurface after a few minutes. When I tried to descend again, both my fins broke, so I returned to the boat, stripped off my wet suit and spent the duration of the dive lap swimming above the coral.



I had arrived the night of the 17th and spent the day of the 18th diving. The diving in Bunaken was unlike anything I've ever seen. Our first dive was a drift dive, a steep declivity of coral with a rushing current that swept us along so that we barely needed to flip a fin. Our second dive was full of the same extraordinary biodiversity -- snakes, sharks, coral, lobster -- but without the current, so we could chose our path and I could truly remember the feeling of being suspended motionless in water.

On my birthday, I boarded the boat for the second dive with my ears still throbbing from the pressure of the first. En route to our site, I asked if I could get in the water first and descend before the others so that my ears would have more time to equalize. As soon as I hit the water, I deflated my BCD and began my descent alone.

The visibility in Bunaken was uneblievably -- watching a shark vanish into the blue distance, I realized the extent to which I could see was nearly limitless.



At 15 meters, I saw the turtle. Two meters more and I felt stabbing pain in my ears. I hovered at 17 meters and watched everyone descend below me.

At first I thought I'd have to stay at 17 meters for the duration of the dive. I swam along the coral wall and watched the dissipating bubbles from air tanks below me trail towards the surface. But slowly I was able to add another meter to my depth, then another. Within 20 minutes, I was shaking Katie's tank to point out a trumpet fish swimming alongside us at 32 meters.

Of course, shaking a neighbor's tank, like gyrating wildly, is not what diving is made for. Despite my gratitude to dive instructors who have pulled me over to show me a tiny shrimp or sea snail I would otherwise never have noticed, I often feel a tinge of resentment at being disturbed from the very personal act of watching. (And for Christ's sake enough with the moray eels already.)



This is part of the reason I find diving such an ethereal and, oh dare I say it, spiritual activity. I am not a beach girl, as much as I'd like to be; laying in the sun is fine in theory, but in my reality, that kind of stillness breeds my very particular brand of anxiety. I can last ten or twenty minutes. But thoughts do not melt away, muscles do not unwind, concerns are not carried away with sea breezes. Instead, that stillness allows for the festering of old anxieties and the creation of new ones, so that I end up with a garden of infinitely creative potential disasters over which I can fret.

For me, the solace is in watching. I'm good at watching. Underwater, a magnificent world unfolds in front of me and makes me a new creature myself, clumsy at first in suspension, gradually acquiring grace. This is what I think other people feel on a beach or at the end of a yoga session when the instructor suggests you "let go of all your worries" (an instruction that inevitably leads me to make a list of all my anxieties -- because how the hell can I let them go if I don't know what they are -- and of course I never make it to the letting go part).

This is as close as I can get to a good stillness, a stillness in which I feel fully myself and, at the same time, let go of myself completely.



This is me, age 26.