The Lady

It's like being dragged underwater. You slowly see the top of the water fall away as you’re pulled deeper under. You try desperately to hold your breath but you can feel your strength fading. Finally, you can’t hold on any longer and your lungs begin to fill with water. And it burns. It's painful, so painful, and you try to escape, but you can’t. No matter how hard you try, you can’t swim away. The water keeps pouring in and the burning sets in again. You become immobile. It goes on like that for a day, and then another, and another, until it's been a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. And the time changes you. The burning sensation remains, but the panic it originally inspired has long faded. The realization of permanence becomes passive acceptance. The murky view of the shore beneath the dark waves is accepted as the only view that there will ever be. It becomes normal… familiar even. So familiar you even forget that you’re drowning. It becomes the way things are. Pouring, burning, and immobility, on and on until you forget what it was like to be out of the water. Until you forget that people are out of the water at all. The echoes of the waves that crash above you tell you over and over again that you are a creature of the water, and you begin to believe it. Lady of the Sea, calls the ocean as the water pours and burns, Lady of the Sea. 

And then you’re at the surface. Suddenly, your head is above the water and for the first time in so long, and you can see clearly. You see the shore for what it is, bright and colorful, so unlike what the water told you before. And you feel the heat again, but you realize with a start that it's sunlight, and it's so unlike the burn. It’s inviting and it’s soothing and it’s warm. Heat without the pain. You realize that the burn has stopped and in your baffled state you try to imagine why. As you ponder the burn and its absence, you finally think of your lungs and you feel it. Air. After so long not even being able to imagine it, you feel it in your body and all around you. And all you can think to do is breathe. Deep, body-shaking breathes as you gulp down as much as your battered lungs allow you to take. You see someone on the shore with an outstretched hand. You can’t see who it is, all their features are shadowed by the ring of golden light around them, but you realize that they pulled your head out of the water. You float there in the ocean you only just then realized was terrifyingly cold, shaking with shock. Only then, from that view do you finally realize how horrible it was to be underwater. How awful, how suffocating it was to be away from the shore, the sun, and the air. A series of realizations and a whole new perspective. And then you’re dragged back under and it all becomes familiar again. 

For me, it was familiar with my mother. I can’t begin to explain our relationship here. I can barely explain it to most people who know me, and even when I’ve tried, even when I’ve talked myself silly for hours, I still couldn’t do the situation justice. It was too complex, too encompassing of so many different aspects to even begin. How was I to explain to everyone that the mother they saw taking me to every activity, nursing me back to health when I was sick, and paying for almost everything in my life was also my deep dark ocean behind doors? Especially when that ocean had the ability to seem as threatening as a kiddie pool when it wanted to. My relationship with my mother and everything that happened for me to get where I am is too long to say in an essay, maybe too long to say in three. I tried at first though. I wrote a paragraph, made it longer, then shortened it, changed some words around, added to it again, and then deleted the whole thing entirely. I read it over and over, and not only did I realize that I hadn’t described it accurately, I also realized that it was completely irrelevant to what I wanted to say. I was in the ocean. It was cold and dark. There isn’t much more to say than that. What made the ocean cold and dark is a story for another day, and has no place here.

It was all in the past, I suppose, in the most literal sense of the word, but when I think about it I’m not even sure that's true. You’re reading this in the present, so was the word you read two seconds ago in the past? And now you’re reading this in the present, so are the words right next to this sentence that you’ll read in a second in the future? I don’t know if anyone can really define a clear difference between the three. The past bleeds into the present and the present skips on and on until everything in the present is the future. I don’t understand when people say that our pasts don’t define us. People don’t live baselessly. Even those who live moment to moment live those moments based on an eternity of other moments that they’ve already had. We’re all like Russian dolls; the experiences in our lives create the layers of a person as they become who they are. Every decision that I make is based on my past. Who and where I was compared to now? I believe this is true for everyone. Who would we be without our past? Blank canvases stumbling around without any direction or purpose. People always say that the past doesn’t define us, but I don’t believe that's entirely true. Someone's past is a part of them, and how they respond to it says everything about who they are. Admiration of a person is taken or given by society by how much a person has developed from the person they were. People love the protagonist of rags to riches stories, and they love to watch the downfall of those who go in the opposite direction. Those who were cowards but grew to be a hero are characterized as brave. A former friend of theirs that tried to betray them along the way is called treacherous. Your past is part of your present and your future is made of the past. If you were in your ocean for fifty years, and you made it out and lived for another twenty, what does that mean? In your lifetime you made it from the bottom of the sea all the way up to the sand on the beach. That means you could have been just a drowning victim, but instead you’re a survivor. Everything about who we are is all about how we react to who we’ve been. The past does define us, it just doesn’t determine where we have to end up. 

 I suppose by making this claim I now am required to state what I take from it. I’ve learned that progress doesn’t have to happen overnight, or be entirely linear in that regard. The water still exists. The memory is so powerful that its effects still threaten to drown me every once in a while. But I promised myself that it would never happen again. The immobility. So no matter what, I’ll make it farther and farther out as time goes on. It threatened to swallow me this year, but it only made it to my forehead. The next time it touches me, it will barely reach my shoulders. I will continue to walk up the shore, across the seashells and the sandhills and eventually it will barely touch the bottoms of my feet. And one day I’ll turn around, and I’ll be out of its reach. I will feel the sunlight and bask in all of its glory. The wind will whip past me, and in its movement, it will say, Lady of the Air, Lady of the Land, Lady of the Light.

I want to be that hand. A hand, for people that need one. This isn’t to say I’ll be a savior; the hand can’t do everything. The person in the water still has to fight their way out and crawl up their own beach. But sometimes, all people need is one pull. A chance to see clearly. A chance to get just one breath of air, and they can start to swim. I want to help people who are still stuck in their oceans. Whatever their oceans may be. For me, it was abuse, but it isn’t for everyone. There was a long period of my life where I believed that being in a situation like I am now was impossible. And yet here I am. Waist-high in the water instead of drowning. Hearing whispers of the wind and feeling tickles of the sun. The shore is a long way away, but I’ve promised myself that I’ll reach out my hand to anyone who needs one as I try to get there.