“I Was a Total Hot Slut Surfing Copywriter… This Is What Burnout Did to Me”

WARNING: This gets a little off-kilter — if that’s not your thing, skip it.

If you’ve ever been where I was — when your whole fucking life is crashing down around you and you start seriously contemplating eating a bullet or swallowing a bottle of pills — then you know the darkness. I’ve only been there once, at 33–34. I went from stacking real money to having jack shit because this undiagnosed insulinoma was eating me alive. I dropped to 90 fucking pounds, Karen Carpenter skeleton thin. Right after show season, I thought I was just completely depleted, so I started doing the most unhinged, self-destructive shit imaginable.

[PICTURE: JUST BEING A TOTAL BLEACHED BEACH BIMBO IN MY 30S…DTF SURF RATS]

I grabbed 10 grand out of savings, flew to Honolulu, shacked up with some ripped surf rat, and blew every dollar on surfing glassy waves all day and getting my pussy absolutely destroyed every night. We fucked like animals — raw, salty, endless — until the money ran dry. Then I flew back to the Bay, went straight back to work like nothing happened. I’d slam a pint of ice cream, run a 7-hour death jog, write a killer ad that pulled in cash, then immediately book another flight to some random tropical spot just to chase more waves and get railed by another surf dude I picked up on the beach. This time it was Costa Rica — warm water, perfect barrels, and a local who fucked me so deep I swear I saw stars between sets.

Surf culture in the tropics is pure hedonism: warm ocean, no wetsuits, boardshorts barely hanging on, bikinis that disappear the second the sun goes down. You paddle out at dawn, score long hollow rides over shallow reefs, then roll back to shore buzzing, horny, and alive. The nights turn into beach bar chaos — cold beers, reggae or salsa thumping, bodies pressed together, and inhibitions melting in the heat. It’s transient, high-sex-drive energy. Surf rats and traveling women mixing, chasing that post-wave high straight into sweaty, sandy fucks in bungalows, under palm trees, or right on the beach if you’re bold enough.

At that point I was pretty sure I was dying. Hair falling out, body wasting away, but my pussy stayed soaked like it had its own agenda. Blowing money, writing copy for clients, getting pounded by whoever was down to wreck me that week. Then boom — my paid-off Mercedes got fucking annihilated by a drunk driver doing over 100 mph on the way from Berkeley to Silicon Valley. That crash flipped something deep inside me.

I cashed out 70k, packed my shit, and bounced to Hawaii. My long-time boys Tyrone and Greg hit me with, “What the fuck are you doing now, just blowing your money and chasing dick?” Yeah… pretty much. When the pressure and the unknown hit too hard, I’d just run toward the ocean.

In those tropical breaks, something ancient cracked open in me. Surf spirituality isn’t some clean, incense-and-yoga Instagram version. In the tropics it’s raw, primal, and filthy — the ocean itself is God, the church, the confessional, and the orgy all rolled into one. You don’t pray on your knees in a building; you paddle out at dawn, heart pounding, and offer your entire body to something bigger than you. Every stroke is surrender. You stop fighting life. You stop controlling. You let the ocean take you.

And when that wave jacks up and you drop in, it’s ego death in the most beautiful, terrifying way. The barrel becomes the holy of holies: green cathedral walls closing around you, light streaking through the lip like stained glass made of water. Time disappears. Thought disappears. All that’s left is pure presence — the same presence you feel when a surf rat pins you against the van door after the session and fucks you so deep and relentless that your mind blanks and your pussy clenches around something divine.

That’s where I started finding God — not in some distant sky daddy, but in the warm, salty cunt of the sea and in the hard, hungry souls of the men who lived inside it. There’s a kind of peace in their eyes you’ll never touch — because capitalism trained you to produce more, write more, build more. Always more. No finish line, no exhale — just a system that keeps you running while it quietly drains you dry.

But it’s the middle of the night, you’re watching them sleep, and your suitcase is sitting there like a reminder — you’ve got to get back to the Bay, back to work, back to building, back to getting out of your own way and out of that learned helplessness. They’re breathing slow, peaceful, maybe they love you… maybe they don’t. Doesn’t matter. You grab your bag quietly, careful not to wake them, and you leave. By the time you’re in the air, their name is already fading, their number forgotten — just another stop before heading back to the grind, back to producing, back into the machine that never lets you sit still.

And then you catch a glimpse of yourself in a fucking window as you walk to your office in this goddamn city full of corrupt politics that’s turned into straight-up Gotham. You’re thinking, “What the fuck am I doing here again?” But somehow you just love the fucking abuse. You could self-flagellate all day long, pussy still throbbing from last night’s session, ruminating over the same brutal choice: run far the fuck away to breathe in a culture that doesn’t give a single shit, or stay and keep running the show like the masochistic queen you are.

The show must go on.

No matter how fucking intense it gets — the brutal ups and downs, the lefts and rights that leave you raw and dripping — you just keep putting one foot in front of the other. The monotony, the burnout, doing Geos while your identity feels like it could slip away at any second so you can finally be no one to no one and nothing to nothing. Just another salty, wave-fucked soul disappearing into the warm ocean where God lives between barrels and orgasms.

Lucky for me, I dragged my ass back to school, ground out a PhD, and finally got this fucking life together. I don’t have to play ad copy slut anymore for ungrateful assholes who don’t deserve my words or my farts. One of those clowns actually threatened to sue me for 50k because his dumbass idea flopped. People don’t open factories when they have no fucking idea what they’re doing.

Anyway, I have to go now. The pen is calling.

Doc

P.S. Time to work. Great things don’t write themselves.

P.S.S. I wrote a book on recovering from burnout about a year ago — right when it hit me I’d been stuck in that same exhausting loop. It was dragging me down more than I wanted to admit. You can grab it on Amazon, or just DM me here and I’ll hook you up with a copy.