The Undertow I Turned into a Lifestyle

This one took me a little farther from shore than I expected. Pull up a chair. We may be here a minute.

10-minute read

I grew up in a shark tank.

Not literally, obviously.

Although at this point, believing I grew a damn tail may actually require less suspension of disbelief than explaining some of my life.

My parents weren't sharks.

Quite the opposite.

Two little clownfish somehow trying to raise a premature baby Nemo with a messed-up fin in a tank where everybody seemed to smell blood.

Maybe a third parent was Dory.

That's still under editorial review.

But none of us were sharks.

We were the idiots trying to convince the sharks that fish were friends, not food.

I prepared for sharks because sharks were what I knew.

Something happened.

Then something else happened.

Then something else happened.

Shark.

Shark.

Shark.

By the time I was old enough to understand danger, I knew what teeth looked like.

Catastrophe was recognizable.

It announced itself.

It changed everything at once.

What never occurred to me was that an ocean contains a hell of a lot more than sharks.

Stingrays.

Jellyfish.

Bottom Feeders.

Hooks disguised as shiny things.

Currents you cannot see.

Sand disappearing one grain at a time.

Turns out, I knew how to survive catastrophe.

I didn't know nearly as much about erosion.

I learned young that I could change the temperature of a room.

Clean something.

Sweep.

Read.

Dance.

Be useful.

Make somebody laugh.

Give whatever I had that might make things easier.

I don't remember deciding that usefulness made me lovable.

I doubt any child decides something like that.

But the two became tangled together.

If I had something to give, I had somewhere to belong.

If I had somewhere to belong, I had someone who loved me.

All three of my parents and the entire village that raised me were generous.

To a little girl, it looked effortless.

What I couldn't see yet was the cost.

Children rarely see the bill.

So I grew up believing that if I could help, I should.

And I liked helping.

That is important.

I wasn't walking around reluctantly sacrificing myself for humanity.

I liked being useful.

I liked making people laugh.

I liked figuring things out.

I liked being the person somebody called because they knew I'd show up.

Somewhere between being a preteen and twenty-five, I realized I had powers.

Not actual powers.

Although we are already pretending I grew a tail, so stay with me.

I could read a room.

Sometimes I swear I could bend the damn air in my direction.

I could talk to almost anybody.

I could understand people who were nothing like me.

I could make someone feel seen.

I could calm things down.

I could make people laugh in situations where laughing probably should've required a permission slip.

The gills worked.

And that felt good.

I can help.

Became:

I like that I can help.

Then:

They know I can help.

Then:

They expect me to help.

And eventually:

Why aren’t you helping?

Why the fuck can't I do this anymore?

Somewhere in there, I became a mermaid.

A mermaid is magical.

Mythical.

Rare enough that believing one exists might make somebody question their own reality.

Maybe that's part of the problem.

Sometimes a person survives so many things that when they finally tell the truth about them, people look at the story instead of the person telling it.

Surely not.

That couldn't all have happened.

Something isn't adding up.

And there she is.

Behind the glass.

Everyone staring at the mermaid.

A mermaid is beautiful.

Interesting.

Strong.

Helpful.

Different.

People admire the tail.

Nobody asks what it cost to grow one.

Eventually even the mermaid forgets.

She becomes so good at breathing underwater that everybody assumes she doesn't need air.

Including her.

So she smiles.

Helps.

Makes jokes.

Finds the sparkly things.

Builds buoys.

Throws them toward people who look like they arestruggling.

Sometimes people who are struggling.

Sometimes people who could probably stand up if she'd quit insisting they were drowning.

Sometimes people who intended to use her from the start.

That one took me a little longer to learn.

I used my emotional gills for people who never asked me to breathe for them.

I anticipated.

Protected.

Interpreted.

Intercepted.

Tried to fix the water before it ever reached the people I loved.

I thought that was love.

Sometimes it was.

Sometimes it was fear wearing a very convincing love costume.

And sometimes it was simply none of my damn business.

That's harder to admit.

My daddy used to call me his little mermaid.

I could adapt.

Different rooms brought out different parts of me.

People sometimes called that fake.

Daddy didn't.

The lesson I took from him was simpler:

Swim with sharks.

Swim with fish.

Float beside a fucking dolphin if that's where the day takes you.

Just look down every once in a while and make sure you still recognize your own scales.

The problem was never adaptation.

The problem was when adapting became disappearing.

I could understand someone's feelings without understanding their intentions.

Worse, I became so good at understanding why people behaved the way they did that sometimes I used the explanation to excuse the behavior.

People make mistakes.

I make mistakes.

People change.

People deserve grace.

All true.

But eventually forgiveness became access.

And I didn't understand yet that those were two entirely different things.

I knew how to read a room long before I learned I was allowed to leave one.

I knew how to survive somewhere and mistook that for belonging there.

I could defend myself endlessly because I believed if I could just find the right words, surely someone who loved me would eventually understand.

I gave grace.

Then more.

Then more.

A scale here.

Another there.

Not every time someone hurt me.

Those weren't their scales to take.

I lost one when I abandoned something I knew because preserving the attachment felt more important.

When I knew something wasn't right but stayed.

When I knew what advice I'd give my friend and somehow decided it didn't apply to me.

When I chose somebody else's comfort over my peace.

When I made an excuse because I understood why.

When I thought doing the right thing meant doing what I wished someone would do for me.

When I confused forgiving someone with handing them the same access again.

One scale at a time.

Until eventually I looked down.

Wait a fucking minute.

Where the hell did I go?

And all the while I kept telling myself I was floating.

Daddy taught me that.

Respect the ocean.

Don't fear her.

If you get caught in an undertow, don't fight it.

Float.

She'll bring you back to shore.

So I floated.

At least...

I thought I did.

The undertow, I eventually learned, wasn't betrayal.

It wasn't even expectation exactly.

The undertow was believing the undertow could be anything other than the undertow.

That if I loved hard enough, understood enough, explained enough, forgave enough, showed up enough, the current might eventually decide to stop being a current.

It doesn't.

That's the point of respecting the ocean.

Respect requires seeing what is in front of you.

A shark is a shark.

A jellyfish is a jellyfish.

A hook is still a hook even when somebody hangs something shiny from it.

And an undertow doesn't become less of an undertow because you can find the silver lining.

Here's the ridiculous part.

I love the unknown.

Give me something new to learn and I'm delighted.

Give me an uncertain relationship and I'm suddenly an unpaid FBI analyst with seventeen open tabs and a theory.

I love discovery.

I love possibility.

I hate not knowing where I stand.

Maybe that was why I stayed in familiar tanks longer than I should have.

I knew how the ecosystem worked.

Until I didn't.

And by the time I realized I needed to get out, the sand underneath me had eroded.

I was underwater.

I'd reached the top of the tank before.

Plenty of times.

I'd spent years telling other people to leap.

Jump.

Fly.

Swim.

Stand.

Go.

Whatever.

Success is on the other side of fear.

Beautiful advice.

Very inspirational.

Would probably look lovely written over a sunset.

Turns out it's considerably more inconvenient when you're the asshole standing on the ledge.

I had made it to the top before.

I just couldn't jump.

Until I did.

I jumped.

And what happened was exactly what you would expect.

I felt like I was drowning.

No glorious music.

No sunlight breaking through the clouds.

No welcoming committee.

No fucking dolphins.

Nothing.

I was in the dark, suddenly questioning everything I had ever believed about myself.

Was I all the things people had said?

Was I not a mermaid?

Not a great swimmer?

Not a kind person?

Had I been the actual fucking problem this entire time?

I had spent years threatening to jump.

You'll miss me when I'm gone.

You'll see everything I did.

You'll understand how much I loved you.

Then one day, sitting in literal darkness in a place that felt more like a war zone than a home...

I jumped.

And nobody came.

Let me make that clear.

Nobody came.

Not when I asked.

Not when I said I was scared.

Not when I said I wasn't safe.

Not when I said I wasn't lying.

Not when I said I needed help.

Not when I asked whether anybody was jumping with me.

Nobody came.

And there are moments when that knowledge still hurts.

But eventually I had to face something harder than being alone.

I had to let go of the expectation that someday everybody would understand.

That somebody would arrive and say:

I see it now.

You were telling the truth.

That was too much.

You shouldn't have had to carry that.

Come here. I've got some of it.

I desperately wanted somebody to see me.

Love me.

Pick me.

Understand me.

Not necessarily romantically.

I wanted a person.

Someone who could absorb the emotional bark while I bounced it off the walls until my brain made sense again.

Someone who would say:

I see you.

I've got you.

That's hard.

Do you need a hug?

And wanting that wasn't weakness.

It was human.

The problem was believing I couldn’t keep swimming until somebody else confirmed I had a right to be tired.

Because here’s another inconvenient fact:

I am not actually a fucking mermaid.

I have legs.

I need air.

I needed help.

And when no one came…

I started fucking swimming.

Not toward a person.

Not anymore.

Just away.

Away from dependence.

Away from fear.

Away from the idea that somebody else had to understand my reality before it counted.

Toward financial freedom.

Physical freedom.

Mental freedom.

Acceptance.

For a while I swam toward the hope of somebody.

Then eventually I had to let that go too.

Not necessarily the love.

The expectation.

I let go of controlling how other people related to my children.

I let go of trying to force relationships into the shapes I believed they should have.

I let go of telling people who they could become if they would just try.

I could love without rescuing.

I could forgive without returning.

I could trust without granting unlimited access.

I could hope without building my house on somebody else’s potential.

I did not want to become hard.

I did not want to stop swimming.

I just needed to learn when to let go.

And something strange happened when I finally did.

I reached the surface pretty damn quickly.

Turns out…

I was overloaded.

So I took the biggest breath I could.

I didn’t look around.

I didn’t check who had followed.

I didn’t immediately start searching for somebody else to help.

I rolled onto my back.

And I floated.

Not because everything was fixed.

Not because I was healed.

Not because I had finally become some enlightened woman who never makes terrible decisions again.

I was breathing.

That was enough.

Eventually I looked around.

I expected shore.

I don’t remember seeing it.

What I saw were boats.

Big, beautiful boats.

And somehow it seemed like everyone I’d ever helped, everyone I’d ever loved, maybe even everyone I’d ever lost, was on one.

And still:

I need this.

What about that?

You used to be like this.

You used to be able to handle this.

None of them realizing that every time I stopped floating and tried to reach another boat, I started taking on water again.

Then I learned something embarrassingly simple.

Someone calling my name doesn’t mean they’re drowning.

Some people were already on boats.

Some could stand.

Some needed help.

Some didn’t.

And none of that required me to stop breathing.

Then life, apparently tired of waiting for me to understand the metaphor, got literal.

The power got cut off.

I took my little boy’s hand.

And I walked away.

My mother would call it putting the shovel down.

Daddy probably would’ve told me I was long overdue to leave a room I should’ve left a long time ago.

And somewhere in there lived another lesson:

The only person you are guaranteed to have for your entire life is yourself.

That didn’t mean I had to stop being good to people.

God, I hope not.

Generosity is in my blood.

My mother used to joke that’s why I’d never be rich.

For the record, I would still like to be financially sound.

But I finally understood that being generous did not require giving everything away.

And maybe that’s the strangest part.

I did leave everything.

The home.

The certainty.

The expectations.

The belief system I’d inherited and spent years dismantling and rebuilding.

I kept what was good.

I left what wasn’t.

One did not have to disappear to make the other true.

The good didn’t require me to deny the bad.

The bad didn’t require me to surrender the good.

My children had to ride part of that storm with me.

I wish they hadn’t.

That’s part of my side of the street.

But when everything else was stripped away, I discovered there were things I hadn’t actually carried out with me.

They had simply remained.

Integrity.

Humor.

My apparently indestructible ability to find something funny in the most morbid possible situation.

Love.

Generosity.

Curiosity.

The willingness to trust until someone gives me a reason to reconsider their access.

The belief that people make mistakes.

The belief that people can change.

And the understanding that neither belief obligates me to stand still while they decide whether they will.

Daddy’s voice remained too.

Show up.

Look alert.

Keep your mouth shut.

You’re responsible for your side of the street.

The truth always comes out in the wash.

And one I’d learned for myself:

Success is just the other side of your fear.

People could call me a fish.

A shark.

A dolphin.

Fake.

Too much.

Not enough.

Whatever they needed to call me.

I didn’t need to spend the rest of my life correcting everyone’s marine biology.

I only needed to look down every once in a while.

Make sure I still recognized my own scales.

And swim accordingly.

Because maybe Daddy’s lesson about the ocean was never only about water.

Respect her.

Don’t fight every current.

Float when you need to.

She’ll bring you home.

Maybe respecting myself worked the same way.

I had spent years trying to convince everybody else that the mermaid was real.

Turns out…

I didn’t need to.

I knew what remained.

For the moment, there was water in every direction.

I didn’t know exactly where shore was.

I didn’t know what came next.

Hell, I wasn’t sure I still knew how to swim.

But I had air in my lungs.

I recognized my scales.

So I rolled onto my back again.

And floated.

Southern Peanut