I am not big on ‘trigger warnings,’ however, being a PTSD survivor myself, I understand the desire for them by some. There is a brief mention of suicidal ideation among the following paragraphs, so if that is something that you are sensitive to, you may want to skip this post for now and come back when you are more prepared.

When I was about seven or eight, my dad took me to a water park for the first time. I wasn’t big on water slides, so I spent most of my time in the wading pools and tide pools. They had a wave machine they called “Breaker Beach.” It was on a gradient, so while the waves were turned off, I went up to the thick red line that none without inner tubes were allowed to cross. my goal was to stand atop of it to see how much taller I was in comparison. I could still touch the bottom and keep my head above water if I stood on my toes, but just barely.

That’s when the wave machine started. There I was, not yet tall enough to stand my ground, swept away into the sea of people in inner tubes. I held my breath and tried to catch fresh air in those brief and rare moments that my face was above water, and other than that, I just tried to remain calm and float as best as I could, but truth be told, I had very little control over the direction I moved or even the direction that my body was in as the strength of the waves pushed me about. Yet, I did not struggle, because I had had several years of swim lessons already that told me that struggling against the waves could actually have made my situation worse.

I felt myself being brushed up against inner tubes, getting occasionally entangled in people’s legs. I did hear some people ask each other if they knew who I was or where I had come from, but no hands reached down to grab hold of me, and there was no sign that I could tell of a lifeguard.

After what was likely about two minutes– but felt much longer– the waves stopped, and I was able to resurface, regain my orientation, and swim to shore, where my father was seated in the shallow end.

And my biggest worry at the time was not why no one had come to my rescue, though that would be something I would come to question later, my biggest worry was that my dad would feel like such a terrible parent if he had known how close to drowning I was only moments prior. So I smiled at him as though I had been having fun and vowed to never tell him the story.

In my adult life, whenever a situation would get tough, I would contemplate ending it all. Hanging myself, slitting my wrists– not very efficient methods. For a long time, I believed it was actually because I wanted to doe, but once I started learning to manage my anxiety, I realized what it really meant was that I desperately wanted to evade a situation I did not know how to handle. At least not effectively. So I started looking for the things I could do. Any small thing that I might be able to control.

However, most of the time, I ended up realizing that there was very little in the situation I was in that I could control. Especially when the situation involved another person who would neither listen nor forgive. And it kept bringing me back to what I had learned in that wave machine. Sometimes the best you can do is stay calm and let the waves push you about, breathing in those few moments your head is above water. Yes, it does feel very helpless, but if you don’t fight back, you’re much less likely to drown. And eventually, the waves will end, even though they might seem to go on infinitely while you’re right in the middle of it.