Under Waves

        I fall under waves of sadness sometimes. I find that I can't shake it, I can't fight it, and I can't get over it. I have to just live it. I have spent years living this way. You name the remedy, I've tried it...but I have to endure. I have to let go of trying to control my emotions, trying to force myself to be happy or thankful or joyful and just be.

       I've come to realize that my emotions are like an ocean. Deep and scary, powerful and overwhelming, an unending expanse of water and waves. Water is necessary for life, just like emotions are an important part of living. But it is so easy to drown when you aren't prepared for the water you are thrown into isn't it? It's the same with emotions--when you are pulled into a wave of emotions you can so easily drown under waves of sadness, anger, anxiety or fear. The more you struggle when you are drowning in water, the more likely you are to lose air faster and drown quicker. When you struggle against your emotions, fighting them and trying to "fake it til you make it" you are so much more likely to be become bitter or depressed because of the prolonged nature of your emotional state. I know this because I've lived that way for years, and it's nearly destroyed me. I have spent years pretending I was okay, never dealing with my emotions, never allowing myself to feel them and allow them to work themselves out and what happened in the end was I bottled them up and let them collect to the point where I was destroying myself from the inside out. I let my emotional struggles define my behavioral habits that now define who I am. At almost 25 years old, I will spend the rest of my life battling the physical ramifications of those emotional problems I stored up as a teenager.

    I fall under waves of sadness sometimes. And now I close my heart around the sadness and feel it in every fiber of my being. I let it have free reign in my mind, I let it take over for however long it needs to be there. Sometimes it's just a day, sometimes, like right now, it's much longer. But it always goes away because in the end it is not meant to be my emotional base. It just pulls me under every now and then so I just take a deep breath, stretch out, and float until I reach the top.