Blind Surfer Embraces Challenges To Recover From PTSD

You can learn more about Joshua “The Jedi” Loya here.

TRANSCRIPT

TW: A head’s up we briefly describe an incident of physical and psychological abuse in this episode.

Like many kids growing up in the eighties, Joshua Loya wanted to be the Karate Kid.

I had loved, I wanted to be Mr. Miyagi's student, you know, I was like, you know, real young when I saw the Karate Kid and I liked Bruce Lee movies and Ninja Turtles.

But for much of his childhood Joshua had to be careful. He couldn’t do martial arts or any sports where he could possibly injure his eyes. 

At the age of three his doctor had discovered Joshua was blind in his right eye and extremely nearsighted in his left, so his doctor warned him if he injured that eye he’d likely go completely blind. 

By the time he was a sophomore in high school he’d had four eye surgeries and had missed a lot of school.

Here I am kind of this sort of gothy kid slash you know, I don't know, it was very much like an artsy kid, but also wanted to do like, I was really into metal at the time, and I was very restless. And they couldn't, they told me I couldn't run, I couldn't lift weights, mostly because they were concerned about a retinal hemorrhage, or getting hit, you know, like very...very restricted in my activity. And so what do I do? Here I am 15 year old kid, I'm kind of an appreciation for the darker aesthetic, big metal fan. I grabbed a pair of nunchucks that I had bought at a pawn shop… no martial arts training really, turned up for our Beyond Driven album as loud as it would possibly go, and promptly hit myself in my good eye. 

You’d think the accident would have sent Joshua into a depression, but it actually had the opposite effect. This is a story about how the worst possible thing that could’ve happened, did happen and eventually set him free.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

From California To Ohio

Joshua Loya grew up in Santa Cruz, California, known for its surfing and colorful characters. Before he lost his sight he loved going down to the pier and watching the surfers.

For me, I've always oddly felt Californian in some ways more than an American. California has always symbolized hope. You'd walk down Pacific Avenue and you'd walk up to a guy wearing a wizard's outfit doing magic tricks, you know, and nobody was like, oh, this is weird.  It allowed me, I think, to have a much more expansive awareness of like, that people can be different and still have some level of value.

His parents divorced when Joshua was five and his mom, who was blind, raised him until he started having some behavioral issues at school.

You know, we didn't understand things like neurodivergence…I wasn't being served well and I was, I was a lot for my mother. She, you know, she raised me by herself. 

So when he was 10, Joshua was sent to live with his dad and step mom just outside Cleveland.

I was devastated. I loved my mother. I wanted to go there. And so I was in this very vulnerable place. I was basically, you know, I was visually impaired, partially sighted and very nearsighted at the time. It was like, okay, we'll put you in the special education class now for this semester here, but also we're not gonna challenge you anywhere near as much academically as we had when you were in the traditional classes…I'm already behind, I'm already deficient in my ability, in my education, in my everything. And then I go to this wildly fish out of water experience. 

At this point he’d been through a lot with his eyes.

I had already had two laser surgeries, because I had tears in my, I had already lost the vision in my right eye. when I was very young, I was very near-set in my left eye, and I already knew I was at risk for losing my eyesight more than other kids, because I had two laser surgeries already. So I wasn't supposed to get hit in the head.

Baby Elephants

Joshua knew, his dad knew, and his step mom knew he wasn’t supposed to get hit in the head… but his step mom had a short fuse.

I remember very distinctly the first time that my stepmother ever hit me. I don't remember what preceded it, but I remember being in the kitchen of the house where we lived …I had never even thought that an adult would do this. I heard about it, but then just fucking smack me a crack across the face, right? … All I remember is going, ‘what is happening?’...And I was already so out of water. I was so floundering, like, you know, like I was stuck in the ocean, like turbulent waves and everything. And then on top of that, now I'm getting smacked in the face. And the physical abuse was not constant, but it was pretty frequent. 

On another occasion Joshua was cleaning up after the dog who had had an accident in the house.

… but I wasn't doing it the way she wanted. I wasn't maybe as thorough or whatever the reason. Um, but the um I had done some of it, so we had this bucket full of ammonia water with some measure of urine and feces, like excess, you know, from wiping, you know, I'd already picked up the whatever but I was just wiping the carpet or whatever. And she didn't like something. And so she dumped that whole big bucket over my head. Yeah, it was pretty rough. I mean, that wasn't, like, I didn't have broken bones and lots of, too many bruises here and there, but like, there were a couple fat lips here once or twice, but it was stuff like that. That was so much worse. 

My dad's he's okay… but he was kind of checked out. And I think he was genuinely afraid of her, meaning my stepmother… I did try to reach out to the neighbors, but again, mind you, this is rural, pre-internet, northeastern Ohio.

LAUREL: Did you tell your mom?

JOSHUA:  I did. And she tried desperately to get me home. My mother, I don't think, knew how severe the abuse was… I wanted to spare her … she thought she was doing what was best for me when she sent me out there.

By the time he was 13, Joshua started to lift weights.

I hadn't quite hit my high octane puberty period, right? I was, I still had a yet not fully changed voice and you know, I didn't look like a young man. I was probably physically stronger than my stepmother. But I, I still was deeply afraid of my stepmother.  I'm reminded sometimes of...like the way they would train elephants in the circus…

The story goes that baby elephants become accustomed to their leash or limitations. But as the elephants grow older and stronger, the trainer doesn’t need to strengthen their rope.

...because the elephant is so convinced that it can't get away, that its spirit's broken. They get conditioned into this mindset that i'm not strong enough to get away. 

So Joshua stayed in Ohio for three and a half years before moving back with his mom. 

Freedom of Choice

It was back in California a couple years later Joshua was 15 and restless. He’d had eye surgery and he was home alone recovering and tired of sitting around doing nothing under strict doctor’s orders. 

That’s when he went to his closet and pulled out the pair of nunchucks he bought at a pawn shop without his mom’s permission. He had poor depth perception since the surgery and no nunchucks training. So when he flung one of the sticks in the air, he hit his one good eye detaching the retina completely and blinding himself almost immediately.

So the last thing I ever saw really was my hand trying to figure out where the heck the phone was so I could call 911.

It wasn't a good thing, but …the limbo part was over. And so it's not that, hey, you're blind now. Now we get to start life. But now the stuff that I wanted to do is like, well, okay, well, what's the risk, ‘you know, you can lose your eyesight.’ Like, check, let's go for it.

So that summer after he lost his eyesight, Joshua went water skiing for the first time. Soon after he signed up for kung fu. When he turned 18 he went skydiving.

JOSHUA: I had an opportunity to realize my strength. I got very deeply involved not only in learning martial arts, but teaching martial arts. And I would go to professional martial arts conventions with my dojo.

‘Joshua The Jedi’

He threw himself into martial arts and even began to compete.

You may not be very good, might get your butt kicked every single time you go, but you're starting to make sense of it…And it's scary as scary can get out when you have somebody who outweighs you by 60 pounds and they're choking you to the point where you either need to tap out or you're gonna pass out. 

He got a job teaching visually impaired people how to navigate computers. When he wasn’t working, he was at his dojo. And he felt himself growing stronger. People started calling him “Joshua the Jedi” and he got a tattoo of Yoda on his forearm. 

It was 2016. Joshua had several black belts and realized he had the potential to compete in the paralympics in four years. In order to do that, he needed to quit his job and treat himself like a professional athlete. But training six to eight hours a day proved hard on his body.

I want to do something else. And there was this blind surfing event and like, oh, that's cool to check that out. 

It was there he found out how it works with someone else in the water with the visually impaired surfer, giving verbal cues telling them when to dive under and when to pop up. Joshua was a natural because of all his martial arts training. There was a coach there who spotted him.

And I was popping up like a jungle cat when we were out there on the, I was actually learning how to surf. And so he was like, oh, here's my new star. I'd had another really kind of demoralizing loss at a judo tournament. And I was like, I'll give it a shot. And he had reached out and he said, oh, the US Open of adaptive surfing is in like two months. If you register, I'll get you ready enough that you can compete. Within a year, I go from, less than a year of formal surf training, here I am, you know, surfing Kelly Slater's wave pool a few weeks later. 

He surfed big waves and won national competitions. At one event Joshua emerged from the water to hear the announcer say, “the Jedi has captured the title.”

JOSHUA:  I was on top of the world in terms of how well I was doing at surfing. But I stopped enjoying it. And because it bec-

LAUREL: Why do you think...

JOSHUA: Because it became about performing for other people.

Forced Meditation

But as Joshua says the ocean doesn’t care who you are and what disabilities you may or may not have. At one competition where Joshua was competing with surfers around the world he and his partner John White paddled out.

But the current was really, really strong… we were like 20 feet from me crashing into rocks and potentially being in more than one adaptive surf division. And all I knew, because I have a lot of trust in John …He's like, ‘we need to get the fuck out of here. Paddle now. Let's go.’ And so, because I had to more pay attention to him and what the water was doing to me and making sure my position, I didn't have time to think about the rocks that were 20 feet away.

Later he was able to reflect back on the situation. He learned a couple things that day: one, you can’t control the wave, you can only control how you respond to it. And two… 

It allowed me to appreciate the value of struggle. The ocean doesn't care if you're blind, it doesn't care if you are what people in the autistic community refer to as neurotypical. It doesn't matter if you have PTSD or if you even have the ability to speak or stand or move your arm. The ocean is there for everyone. It'll be a friend and it'll be a teacher. And when you go into the water and you have that moment where it's absolute dog shit and you're in a world championship surf contest and you, the surf is so violent that you get sucked south of the competition zone and you come back out  of the water and you got your ass handed to you, but you're still okay. There is a therapy in the experience of that, that if you can tap into it, is profoundly empowering, no matter how well you actually do. But that only works if you're doing it for you.

Today Joshua still competes but only surfs for himself. And he’s had profound moments out on the water. One day he met John and some locals at one of their favorite surfing spots. As they’re paddling out something magical happened…

He said, pull your arms up because he saw what was happening. He just wanted to give me the clue. And then I knew something was going on. And then kind of, I felt the shift in the water a little bit as it went underneath my board. And then he's like, ‘yeah, dude, a juvenile dolphin just swam underneath your board.’ It may not be that I know for sure that it's a dolphin, but you know, I'll experience it and then I'll have the context later. And oftentimes that's what my life is, is frequently like. I'll have it experience and then I'll get the additional context later.

Coping With Darkness

Joshua is still coping with PTSD and doesn’t always feel like sparring or surfing.

I'll have these moments where I can have a really good day or a good period and all of a sudden I'll have these feelings of just, like darkness, or whatever just kind of come upon me real suddenly. My guide dog that I have and you know, her primary function is, is being a guide dog, but she came and she, she's like a 70 pound black Labrador. Uh, she's a total diva. And she thinks she's a lap dog. So I sat on the floor and she got in my lap. And I just cuddled with her for about 15, 20 minutes. 

On good days he’ll try something new. His latest passion is stand up comedy. He got into it because he’d injured his hamstring sparring in judo.

JOSHUA: And I needed to do something that was scary for me. Because it was like, well, the whole reason I was doing judo is to kind of gain victory over my fear. Um, because I didn't want to hit the ground and not know where it was coming from. Um, and so I did stand up

LAUREL: What did it feel like to do stand up?

JOSHUA: Oh my god. It was a, in some ways, a homecoming…Sometimes social situations are extremely difficult for me... I might repeat a word a couple of times. It makes me feel kind of self-conscious. Internally, it's work. Because I don't necessarily know what the right rules are. With stand-up this is a very clearly defined parameter and I can be as wild or as abstract or as whatever as I want because there are very few rules to comedy in order to be good. I mean there's a certain aspect of just telling it being up there, it charges me up, but I've also had a couple times where people have come up to me after I've gotten off stage, you know, like at the bar, you know, or whatever the case may be, and they've told me how much they appreciated my comedy. 

STANDUP: I once had a woman grab my hand, forcibly bring it to her face, and say, ‘remember me it's Denise.’ I had no idea who she was. I still don't. 

I thought about this idea of emotional alchemy right of taking those dark things and turning them into joy. It's not joyful for me that I hit myself with nunchucks. But people love hearing how I had all of the enthusiasm of Napoleon Dynamite without any of his skills.  There's a comedian, Jimmy Carr, he's a he's a British guy. He makes an important point that there is a very, very significant difference between horrible things and jokes about horrible things. Because the horrible thing is horrible. Assuming it's crafted and told well, it's a big caveat, right? Because you can tell a joke about a horrible thing and if you're not funny, you're just making the situation worse, maybe, potentially. But if you're able to talk about a horrible thing and make a joke about it, then it changes the emotional intensity of the initial thing. And it allows you to have joy where before there was just heartache.

When the pandemic forced everyone inside, Joshua started a podcast called Adventure Mind – how we live life instead of life living us. 

Clip from Adventure Mind: Aloha adventurer, this is me Joshua Loya, your friendly neighborhood Jedi…

I think one of the key things for my recovery from this has been to find strength. Finding something that's hard…and scary. Now what's hard and scary for a person and what level of hard and scary they can allow themselves to do without hurting themselves…For me, I've chosen to kind of dig more dramatically into martial arts and surfing and stand-up comedy finding places where I can notice myself improve and get better at something. Even if that getting better is just becoming more aware of what's happening while I'm doing the chaotic thing.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.