Healing at the Beach
The beach house costs $4,000 a week and promises transformation. Six people came to perform wellness for an audience of themselves.
Margaret (Corporate Burnout, Seeking "Alignment")
Margaret brought seventeen self-help books to the beach house, arranged them by spine color on the bookshelf, took a photo for Instagram with the caption "healing era ," then spent three days avoiding them like they might assign homework.
She does sunrise yoga on the beach but keeps checking her phone between poses to see if her replacement at work has fucked up yet. Downward dog with one eye on LinkedIn. Warrior pose instead of drafting an email because she's "disconnected from toxic productivity cycles."
Her smoothie routine has seventeen steps and costs more than her car payment used to. Spirulina, ashwagandha, something called "sea moss" that looks like it died in a very specific way. She drinks it on the deck while wearing linen pajamas that cost $140 and are designed to signal that she's the kind of person who has transcended caring about things like "looking put together.”
Every conversation starts with "my therapist says" and ends with her checking the Headspace app to log that she's been "present" for twelve consecutive minutes.
Dave (Divorced, Finding Himself)
Dave bought a ukulele because that's what the midlife crisis starter pack said to do after the divorce, after the sports car proved too expensive, after the motorcycle proved too scary. He knows four chords. He plays three of them for all of us.
He's grown a beard that looks less "rugged wisdom" and more "recently escaped from something." His ex-wife would have made him trim it by week two.
He does intermittent fasting but calls it "listening to my body" when really he just forgot to eat because he was staring at the ocean wondering if he wasted his entire forties. His body is saying "Dave, we're hungry and sad," but Dave's interpreting it as spiritual growth.
The beach house AirBnb has a collection of philosophical quote plaques - "Not all who wander are lost" and "The ocean is calling" - and Dave photographs himself pointing at each one like they were written specifically about his journey.
Rick (Burnt Out Creative, "On Sabbatical")
Rick tells people he's on sabbatical like he's a tenured professor and not a freelance graphic designer who had a breakdown over a logo revision and ghosted four clients.
He's reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, highlighting different passages each time like maybe the magic will activate. He talks about "getting back to analog" while posting sunset photos with 7 filters and captions about authenticity.
His crisis uniform: linen shirt (unbuttoned, obviously), vintage Ray-Bans (broken, held together with superglue and delusion), a leather journal from a artisanal shop that because suffering for your art is part of the creative journey.
He's working on a "passion project" that so far is twenty minutes of footage of waves that he took on his iPhone.
Laura (Empty Nester, Lost Without Schedule)
Laura’s kids are in college and suddenly her Google Calendar looks like a genocide - just vast white space where carpools and soccer practice used to be. She came to the beach to "rediscover herself" but it turns out herself is someone who really enjoyed having too much to do.
She tries to read novels but keeps organizing beach cleanup activities that nobody attends. She's color-coded seventeen strangers' recycling.
She's taken three online courses on "finding your purpose" but keeps getting distracted by the course platform's organizational features. She's made a spreadsheet of her healing journey. She's created a Gantt chart for self-discovery.
The meditation teacher keeps saying "just be" and Laura keeps thinking "just be WHAT? Give me a verb. Give me a task. Give me something to optimize."
Cheryl (Threat Assessment Professional, Cannot Clock Out)
Cheryl's resting heart rate is 72 but her nervous system thinks she's being hunted through the Vietnamese jungle in 1976. She wasn't. She was just raised by people who treated childhood like a combat zone, then spent twenty years in government work that said "oh good, you already know how to treat everyone like an enemy combatant."
She profiles everyone at the beach house within minutes of arrival.
Margaret: people-pleaser with control issues, will crack if you compliment her inconsistently. Dave: conflict-avoidant, pathologically needs to be liked, beard is a cry for help masquerading as masculinity. Stephanie: hyper-vigilant competition, already catalogued every exit route and everyone's emotional weaknesses. Rick: narcissist with imposter syndrome, will turn on you the second his ego feels threatened. Laura: codependent helper, weaponizes care, will absolutely use your secrets against you while claiming it's for your own good.
Cheryl knows she does this. Her therapist has a therapist specifically to process Cheryl's sessions. They've worked on it. They've done EMDR and somatic experiencing and something called "parts work" that costs $200/hour to learn that the child-Cheryl inside her is still hiding under a table while adult-Cheryl writes threat assessments on people buying sustainable coffee.
She came to the beach to "soften." That's what the $250/hour trauma specialist said. "Learn to soften." Like she's a piece of meat that's been in the freezer since 1987. Like you can just defrost decades of hyper-vigilance with some breathwork and a fucking sunset.
She attempts the yoga but spends warrior pose analyzing sight lines and defensive positions. She tries the meditation but her brain treats "observing thoughts" like intelligence gathering - categorizing, filing, preparing reports on a threat labeled <self>. Journaling comes out like after-action reports: "0600: Observed target (self) experiencing vulnerability. Threat level: high. Recommended action: immediate emotional shutdown."
The Beach House
Someone’s supplements are organized in a weekly pill organizer that looks like it could run a small pharmacy. Magnesium for the racing thoughts. Vitamin D for the seasonal depression that's happening in summer somehow. Omega-3s for "brain inflammation" that may or may not exist. A probiotic that cost forty dollars and promises to cure anxiety through gut health, which seems like asking a lot from bacteria.
Journals in bright pink, teal and a sensible brown, - "gratitude practice" – across the front of one but inside it's mostly "I'm grateful I didn't have a panic attack in the grocery store" and "I'm grateful the sunset was nice even though I spent most of it worrying about whether I was appreciating it correctly."
The Drum Circle (Peak Delusion)
Friday night, sunset, someone - probably Dave - suggests the drum circle. Maybe it's the $40 probiotics finally working. Maybe it's the collective realization that they've all spent two weeks "healing" by doing the same anxious shit in a prettier location.
Margaret brings her Bluetooth speaker because of course real drums would be too authentic. Stephanie has researched the "correct" way to participate in a drum circle and is having a small crisis about cultural appropriation while also desperately wanting to bang something. Rick sees this as "performance art" and is already mentally writing the Instagram caption. Laura has made a signup sheet for drum rotation times. Dave has brought his ukulele because he fundamentally misunderstands what drums are.
They sit in a circle on the beach, seventeen healing modalities between them, approximately $50,000 worth of therapy bills in their collective past, and they start to... well, it's not exactly rhythm. It's more like organized chaos. It's like if anxiety learned percussion.
But something happens. Maybe it's the sunset. Maybe it's the shared recognition that they're all ridiculous. Maybe it's that they've all spent so much money and time trying to fix themselves that they've looped back around to accidentally being present.
Margaret stops checking her phone. Stephanie forgets to track this as a "mindfulness moment." Rick stops narrating the experience in his head. Laura surrenders to the fact that there is no correct way to hit a drum. Dave, god help him, puts down the ukulele.
They're all still broken. The beach hasn't fixed them. The green smoothies and meditation apps and linen pajamas and gratitude journals haven't fixed them. But for seventeen minutes, they're broken together, making terrible music, unselfconscious.
The drum circle ends. Everyone checks their phones.
Cheryl checks the perimeter.
Old habits. They don't die. They just get beach houses and call it healing.