L.A. Affairs: I didn’t know how to love. Then I came eye to eye with a majestic gray whale
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I didn’t come to Southern California to find love. I came because I was tired.
Tired of working too many hours with a chronic illness. Tired of my side gig running ultramarathons. Tired of dating men in New York who looked great on paper but left me feeling even more invisible than I had as a child, when my mother called me “garbage” for having a congenital cataract that left me legally blind in one eye.
At 45, I was a doctor with acquired autoimmune disorder, a long trail of self-sabotage and no idea how to be loved. Intimacy terrified me. My body could endure 50 miles of running — but a dinner date? That felt like a risk I couldn’t survive.
At first, I didn’t know a lot about the new man in my life, but what I knew ignited me. And I was willing to risk it all to be with him.
Then one day in January, off the coast of Laguna Beach, I went paddleboarding for the first time. It was supposed to be a mellow sport — something my depleted soul could handle. My instructor and I were far from shore when the sea stilled. No boats. No noise. Just blue on blue.
That’s when she rose.
A 40-ton gray whale surfaced beside me — spy-hopping, they call it — her towering grace lifting from the water, close enough that I could see the walnut shine of her left eye. She hovered in my field of vision for 20 silent, heart-shaking seconds.
Then she sank back beneath the glassy Pacific.
I started to cry inside.
Maybe it sounds ridiculous. But I swear that whale — whom I would later name Molly — saw me. Not as a triathlete, not as a patient, not as a walking résumé. Just me. The girl with one good eye who finally had some vision. The woman who’d spent her life angling for worthiness. Someone who wanted to be chosen but had no idea what that meant.
I’ve never been in a serious relationship or in love before. But I started having serious feelings for a new person in my life. Should I tell her how I feel?
For the first time, I felt claimed by something greater than effort.
Back on shore, my instructor said I was lucky. He’d never seen anything like it. But it didn’t feel like luck. It felt like an invitation. The ancient tide had risen just for me.
In the weeks that followed, I wrote. I rested. I stopped trying to be small and manageable. I started to believe I might actually be worthy of gentleness, of belonging. And then I met James.
He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t complicated. He was just the big guy who ran a bike shop. And he didn’t make me go after him.
What he did was make me ginger tea.
James asked how I was feeling and actually listened to the answer. He kept showing up, even though I greeted him with my best Marlon Brando detachment.
I told him, “Look, buster, you’re barking up the wrong tree.” My well-worn pretense of satiety — of not needing anyone — put up a fight. But his quiet care sneaked up on me. He taught me how to cook my way around 20 food allergies. He held me for hours when I was in physical distress even though his arm fell asleep.
We were opposite in many ways, and yet it worked.
I went on Match to meet my match. But the dates I went on left a lot to be desired. A week before my Match cancellation was final, I read one (last) email out of curiosity.
My fridge used to be a shrine to burnout — shelves of vitamins, maybe a jar of mustard, nothing resembling a meal. I joked that my spices were in my attitude.
But James didn’t flinch. A meat-and-potatoes guy by nature, he dove headfirst into my world of food restrictions and plant-based improvisation. Armed with whatever passed for cookware in my under-equipped kitchen, he made everything work. Chuckling as he opened cabinets that echoed with emptiness, he asked, “Seriously, where do you keep the salt?” I pointed to the fridge.
He met me in chaos more than once. When a massive storm knocked out power and sent the world outside into a flickering haze of uncertainty — no streetlights, no signal, no safety net — James was there. He found me in the dark, packed the car and we drove. We didn’t have a plan, just each other and the puddled roads.
We ended up somewhere quiet, a little inn lighted with backup power and kindness. I don’t remember the name, but I certainly remember how it felt to be safe.
He stayed through even worse. Through a nine-hour mastectomy with reconstructive surgery that carved through fear and tissue. Through the long, slow reckoning that followed a diagnosis no one ever wants. I had spent my life in motion — racing, responding, surviving. But when I couldn’t run anymore, he didn’t run either. He slept upright in a cracked vinyl chair beside my hospital bed for days, leaving only to grab dinner when my brother came to sit with me. With James, there was no grand gesture. Just presence and love, quiet and unrelenting.
Years later, when he finally retired from decades of operating his bike shop, we hit the road again. This time by choice. I was back to competing — triathlons, long runs, challenges of every kind. But now James was battling a recurrence of cancer, his legs wrapped in mystery wounds that took too long to diagnose. And still he said yes to every adventure and anything new. We traveled together, race to race, town to town, living out of suitcases and sunrises.
Although he never raced himself, James carried my starting-line jitters like they were his own. One morning before my triathlon, he pulled the car over, pale and queasy. “I think I’m going to puke,” he said, hand on his stomach. Somewhere along the way, he’d shifted from witness to companion.
Before fire destroyed Pacific Palisades, we were a family — my husband, my daughter and me. Would we still be one after the smoke cleared?
And I understood — I could receive this. I could say yes to letting someone in.
Because Molly had seen me first. In a stunning reversal, that gargantuan mammal had caught me.
I still think about that whale. About her calm power and that soft, unblinking gaze.
She taught me more in 20 seconds — a new way to listen, feel and understand — than I’d learned in 30 years of psychoanalysis and endurance sports. That sometimes the bravest thing you can do is be still. Be real. Be open.
Molly seduced me into knowing that real power lives in openness — in being available, not invincible. I stepped out of the Pacific Ocean that day, but I left behind the belief that love was something I had to hustle for. That I had to shrink, impress or overachieve to deserve it. I left my performances for being.
And in the space where all that striving used to live, something unexpected arrived: love that didn’t need to be chased, fixed or earned. Just offered — and finally, received.
James and I are still together after 15 years. Not because I became someone new, but because I finally stopped hiding who I already was.
The author is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and teaches psychiatry residents as a clinical assistant professor of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her book, “Psychoanalytic and Spiritual Perspectives on Terrorism: Desire for Destruction” was recently published by Routledge. She lives with her partner in the Hudson Valley. She’s on LinkedIn: nina-cerfolio-md
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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