For a long time, I thought my fairytale would involve some knight in shining armor riding up on a white horse, sweeping me off my feet, and taking me away to live happily ever after.
You know, the whole storybook version.
The handsome prince. The grand romance. The happily ever after.
And somewhere along the way, I think I got so caught up in wondering when that part of my story was going to happen that I overlooked something pretty damn important.
Recently, I've been thinking about the life I've had, the life I have right now, and the life I know is still waiting for me.
The places I've been. The adventures I've taken. The people I've loved. The memories I've made.
And somewhere in the middle of all that reflecting, I had one of those moments where you practically have to stop, stretch your arms out, and go...
WAAAAAIT A DAMN MINUTE.
What if I've already been living my fairytale?
Not somebody else's version of it.
Not the one where I'm waiting around for a man on a white horse to show up and make everything magical.
MY fairytale.
The one I've been creating all along.
And when I started thinking about the moments that have made my life feel like something out of a storybook, one particular memory came rushing back.
It begins underwater.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
With a great white shark.
And Then I Saw Her Eye…
I don't think I'll ever forget that eye.
It was HUGE. I was close enough to see the tiny purplish/blueish veins running through it.
And we made eye contact.
There I was, 40 years old, underwater in the Pacific Ocean, looking directly into the eye of a great white shark.
She was inches from my face.
I had dreamed about this moment since I was a little girl.
And suddenly, there she was.
I WAS THERE!
I started to tear up.
Not because I was scared.
Because she was absolutely beautiful.
And then all the sudden it got foggy.
DAMN IT!
My damn tears fogged up my mask and I couldn't see her clear anymore.
Seriously. I wait my entire life for this moment, and my own eyeballs decide to ruin it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let me tell you how I ended up in a cage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, crying over a shark.
A Wild Hair and a Boat to Nowhere…
I've been obsessed with sharks for as long as I can remember.
Not just a little interested. I'm talking full-blown, lifelong fascination with these incredible animals.
So naturally, in 2019, I got a wild hair up my ass and booked myself a nine-day adventure to Guadalupe Island, Mexico, to go cage diving with great white sharks.
By myself.
Because apparently that's what you do when you love sharks and have a questionable sense of self-preservation.
I flew to California, took a bus down to Ensenada, Mexico, and climbed aboard a boat that would take me 20 hours out into the Pacific Ocean.
I wouldn't set foot on land again for nine days.
And I couldn't have been happier.
Well, maybe a little nervous.
I'd only been scuba diving for about a year, and although I was comfortable underwater, traveling alone to spend nine days on a boat with a bunch of strangers was a whole different adventure.
I had no idea what to expect.
Turns out, I was about to find my people.
A Boat Full of Shark-Crazy People
From the moment we got together, there was this instant connection.
Every single person on that boat was there for the same reason. We loved sharks. We were fascinated by them. We wanted to see them, learn about them, photograph them, and spend every possible minute in their world.
Nobody thought anybody else was weird for being completely obsessed with an animal that most people would swim in the opposite direction to avoid.
We had little bunk rooms, shared breakfasts, and lunches that were set out so we could grab something to eat between dives.
There was a hot tub on the upper deck. I'd lie out in the sunshine, watch the ocean, and sometimes watch the sharks from above.
And the evenings?
Oh, the evenings were something else.
We would gather in the main room of the boat, download our photographs, and go over everything we'd seen with the crew.
Some of the sharks had been tagged for research for the Discovery Channel. Others could be identified by their fins, scars, and markings.
We weren't just looking at pictures of great white sharks. We were learning about individual animals.
Who was who. Which sharks had been seen before. What made each one recognizable.
We even got to see the famous Lucy!
I couldn't get enough of it.
The crew even put on little skits in shark costumes in the evenings.
Yes. Shark costumes.
A boat full of grown adults, out in the Pacific Ocean, spending their evenings learning about sharks and laughing at people dressed like them.
It was absolutely my kind of place.
Afterward, there were big dinners, drinks, and plenty of people who got a little sloppy drunk.
I'll just leave that there.
Some of the people I met on that trip are people I still keep in touch with today.
And every morning, I'd wake up, grab my coffee, and look out over the water.
The sunrises were full of what ifs.
What would I see today? Which sharks would come around? What incredible thing might happen?
And the sunsets? Those were full of Oh my God. I DID THAT.
Every single day felt like the beginning of something.
I never wanted it to end.
Now, back to that eye.
What I remember most about my first dive isn't the size of her teeth or how powerful and huge she looked.
It's how slowly she moved.
This enormous great white gliding past my cage as though she had all the time in the world.
And that eye.
I know how this might sound, but when she looked directly at me, it almost felt like she was coming over to say, There you are. We've been waiting for you.
I can't explain it any better than that.
It was everything I had ever dreamed about.
I'd watched the documentaries. I'd stared at the photographs. I'd spent years fascinated by these animals.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for what it felt like to be right there with one.
And once I'd experienced that first encounter, I wanted more.
Every dive brought something different.
And some of those dives brought a little more excitement than I'd bargained for.
Now, before you start thinking I spent nine days floating around in a state of peaceful shark-loving bliss, let me tell you about another dive.
We had two different kinds of cages. Some were near the surface, and others were lowered about 40 feet underwater.
The deep cages were incredible.
There was something almost surreal about being suspended down there, with the silhouette of the boat above you and nothing but endless blue and black ocean stretching out in every direction.
On one particular dive, we had about five massive great whites swimming around our cage.
And let me tell you something.
Television does NOT prepare you for the size of these animals.
You can watch Shark Week all day long and hear somebody say a shark is 15 or 18 feet long.
That's impressive.
But what nobody really explains is how WIDE they are.
Their girth is unbelievable.
Some of these sharks looked about as wide as a damn slug bug.
Yes, a Volkswagen Beetle.
Swimming around you.
Underwater.
With really sharp teeth.
And that's when my brain decided to contribute a few completely unnecessary thoughts.
You know, if these sharks really wanted to, they could tear this little cage apart.
Well, that's comforting.
And if something happened to the cage, how exactly would I get back to the boat?
Oh, probably by swimming upward through the ocean.
You mean past that giant chunk of tuna they're using as bait?
Oh, for the love of God.
And just like that, I went from admiring these magnificent animals to imagining myself being mistaken for a floating tuna sandwich.
I tried to calm myself down.
Slow breaths. Relax. You're fine.
Except I wasn't feeling fine.
I started getting dizzy and lightheaded, and I could feel myself spiraling into a panic attack.
I finally looked at another diver and gave him my very sophisticated underwater signal for:
OH SHIT. I GOTTA GO.
He understood.
He inflated an emergency buoy to alert the crew above, and we started making our way slowly back toward the surface.
He held my hands during the ascent.
I remember looking at him and him looking back at me.
It felt like it took approximately seventeen years to reach that boat.
When we finally got up there, I imagine everybody was expecting some dramatic shark-related emergency.
A missing limb, perhaps.
Nope.
Just me.
"Sorry, guys. Couldn't breathe. It's fine. It's fine."
Nothing to see here.
Just a grown woman who traveled all the way to Mexico to see sharks and briefly decided she'd seen quite enough of them.
And you know what? I got my shit together and,
I went back down the very next day.
Because one frightening moment wasn't going to erase something I'd dreamed about for most of my life.
Over those nine days, I completed roughly 30 dives.
And I would have happily stayed longer.
I've had a lot of adventures since that trip.
I've been diving for years now, and somewhere along the way I stopped counting, but I figure I've got around 500 dives under my weight belt.
I've seen incredible places and experienced things I never could have imagined.
But Guadalupe Island will always have a special place in my heart.
Not just because of the sharks.
Although, let's be clear, the sharks were pretty damn spectacular.
It was the people. The friendships. The laughter. The tiny bunks and the shared meals. The crew dressed up in ridiculous shark costumes. The excitement of gathering every evening to learn which beautiful animals we'd spent our day with.
It was the mornings with coffee and a thousand possibilities stretching out across the ocean.
It was the evenings when I could look back over the day and think, I can't believe I just did that.
And it was that very first great white, swimming slowly past my cage, looking me directly in the eye.
I've never forgotten her.
I don't even know which shark she was.
But I remember her eye.
I remember how beautiful she was.
And I remember what it felt like to realize that a dream I'd carried since childhood was happening right in front of me.
I've said before that sometimes I feel like I'm finally becoming the person I always knew I was.
Looking back at my life, I realize that woman was already there.
She was the one who booked a ticket, boarded a boat full of strangers, and spent nine days in the middle of the ocean because she loved sharks.
And she was the one who cried when she finally met one.
Then swore at her fogged-up mask.
For so long, I thought a fairytale meant waiting for somebody to come along and make my life extraordinary.
And maybe, someday it will be that.
But maybe the extraordinary parts were already happening while I was busy looking for something else.
Maybe happily ever after isn't a destination.
Maybe it's all those moments when you look around and realize you're exactly where you want to be.
And sometimes, apparently, that place is 40 feet underwater, surrounded by great white sharks.
Some people dreampt of castles and princes and happily ever afters.
Me?
I dreamed of great white sharks and a little girl.
And in 2019, I got to live my fairytale.
Apparently This Is Growth
