Shallow Water: Learning to Breathe in the Deep

Real drowning doesn't look like the movies. It looks like a man swimming hard and silently going under.

At thirteen, Scott Isbell was caught in a riptide, fighting for his life, when a stranger handed him a boogie board. At forty, he was a physician and a father of four, and his marriage ended while he believed he was doing all he could and holding up his part of it.

So he went looking for what he had missed. The failures. The root causes. And he did what he was trained to do: stay strong, push through, trust it would be okay. Until it wasn't. With no one left to perform for, he found himself broken, barefoot on a Colorado deck in the dark.

What he found there, he now sees every day in his exam room. Men like Isbell are not toxic. They are not the opposite either, docile or diminished. They are broken in one particular way: without the ability to receive the very things that would help them heal. It is a prescription he could not write for himself, and one a man can only take once he recognizes the need for treatment.

Shallow Water is the story of a doctor diagnosing modern men, with prescriptions and clinical notes in his own handwriting between the chapters. The prescription for becoming whole again begins with three words: Recognize. Receive. Reroute.

For the man swimming hard, and for the people who love him and want to understand him.