The Night I Learned to Breathe Underwater

There was a night I stopped knowing who I was. Not metaphorically—like the kind of existential musings people post on Instagram over sunsets—but a full-body disorientation. I was standing in the shower, water scalding, but I couldn’t feel it. It slid down me like rain on wax, and I just stood there, mouth slightly open, eyes glazed. A hollowed-out version of the girl who used to laugh too loud in coffee shops and write poetry in the margins of receipts.

The walls blurred into a tunnel. Time didn't pass. Or maybe it rushed. I couldn't tell.

That night, my mind folded in on itself like a dying star—imploding, silent but violent.

I don’t know what triggered it. Maybe it was everything. Or maybe it was nothing. That’s the problem with emotional collapse—it doesn’t need a grand entrance. It just slithers in while you're microwaving leftovers or scrolling through texts you never respond to.

I remember the tile. I fixated on it. Pale blue, like the kind of sorrow you inherit from your mother’s silence. I counted the cracks in the grout. Thirty-seven. Then again. Thirty-eight. Then again. My breathing started syncing with the count. I didn’t realize I was trying to stop myself from slipping through the drain with the soap suds.

I dried off and sat on the floor, wrapped in a towel, trembling like a phone on vibrate. My cat meowed from the hallway, but I couldn’t open the door. I couldn’t open anything. I felt locked inside a version of myself I didn’t recognize.

Here’s where the surreal kicks in—I started to see it. Not a vision, not quite a hallucination. More like a metaphor made flesh.

In front of me stood a version of myself—wild-haired, eyes dark with exhaustion, skin pale from nights without sleep. But behind her were others. Hundreds. Thousands maybe. All iterations of me. The me who smiled through family dinners while screaming inside. The me who once dreamt of publishing novels and ended up filing invoices. The child me, the dreamer me, the angry me, the numb me. They stared at me like ghosts, waiting.

Waiting for what, I didn’t know.

Maybe for me to choose.

I stood, legs shaky. The moment I blinked, they disappeared. But their presence burned behind my eyelids. Something cracked open. A thin sliver of truth slicing through the fog.

I wasn’t okay. And I hadn’t been for a long time.

I tried to pretend I was functional. I went to work. I smiled. I posted photos with good lighting and better filters. But inside, I was unraveling, thread by thread, held together only by fear of being seen for what I truly was—broken.

But here’s the wild thing about breaking: if you sit with the pieces long enough, they start to whisper. Not in coherent sentences. No, they’re more poetic than that. They speak in images—of spilled tea and empty notebooks, of missed calls and aching lungs, of the way sunlight hits the floor at 3:17 PM and makes you feel like maybe, just maybe, something divine exists.

I didn’t heal overnight. There was no cinematic montage. Just mornings I forced myself out of bed, even when gravity felt personal. Just conversations with friends where I said, “I’m not okay,” and let them say, “That’s okay.” Just breathing, sometimes too fast, sometimes not at all.

I started therapy. I resisted it at first—my ego wrapping itself in pride like armor. But my therapist was a gentle storm. She didn’t bulldoze me. She just held up mirrors, soft ones, the kind that show you not only your pain, but your possibility.

In one session, I told her I felt like I was drowning.

She asked, “What if you’re learning how to breathe underwater?”

That line stayed with me. Still does. I think about it when the panic creeps in like smoke under a door. I remind myself I have gills now, invisible maybe, but real. Forged in darkness. Strength shaped like survival.

I began writing again—not for likes or publication, but because the page didn’t judge my jagged thoughts. It absorbed them. Transformed them. My journals became sacred ground, stained with ink and tears, but holy nonetheless.

One night, months later, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea, no phone, no distraction—just silence. And for the first time in forever, I didn’t feel scared of the quiet. In fact, I welcomed it. I leaned into it like an old friend. The sky above was painted in twilight, and I swear the stars winked at me, as if to say, See? You made it.

Not everyone does. But I did.

And not just made it—I changed.

I used to think transformation was a phoenix kind of thing—flames, ashes, rebirth. But sometimes, it’s slower. Like erosion. Like how rivers carve canyons not in days, but in decades. My change was quiet. It didn’t announce itself. But it was there—in the way I set boundaries without guilt, in how I looked strangers in the eye, in how I let myself feel joy without bracing for its loss.

These days, I still have bad ones. Days when the old versions of me visit. They don’t haunt me anymore. They sit beside me. We sip tea together. I thank them. Because even in their brokenness, they got me here.

To this moment. To this breath.

To this version of myself—flawed, healing, luminous.