Manual for Breathing Underwater

1- Begin with silence. Not the calm kind, but the crushing kind—the silence that lives inside your chest, pressing against bone, disguising itself as your own pulse.

2- Air is no longer what it once was. It does not come freely. It must be stolen in small doses between tides of panic. Learn to take less, and still call it enough.

3- Your chest will tighten. This is not failure. It is the body re-learning language. Each gasp is a syllable, each pause a comma, each desperate inhale a line break in a poem you never meant to write.

4- The water will feel endless. It is not. It has edges. But edges are cruel—distant, blurred, unreachable when your arms are heavy. Do not mistake distance for impossibility.

5- The water is not only your enemy. Sometimes it lifts you, carries you, offers weightlessness like mercy. Sometimes it crushes like a hand around the throat. Learn to tell which is which.

6- Do not thrash. Desperation clouds vision, turns every movement into sabotage. Stillness is your weapon. When you stop fighting, the surface reveals itself—not as rescue, but as possibility.

7- Count the bubbles. Each one is a messenger. They rise when you cannot. They remind you that upward exists. They remind you that gravity does not own you.

8- Trust your lungs. They are stubborn creatures. Even when you believe they are empty, they scrape oxygen from the impossible, clawing at survival with unseen hands.

9- Panic is the loudest voice in the water. It will arrive before the danger does, whispering drowning into your bones, rehearsing your end as if it were already written. Do not mistake rehearsal for fate.

10- If you must scream, release it into the water. Let the scream turn into bubbles. Watch them rise. Watch how the water swallows them without judgment, how they vanish without echo.

11- Some days you will forget the method. Some days the water will win. This is not weakness. Survival is tidal—ebb and flow, advance and retreat. Allow yourself to sink, if only for a moment. Rising is not lost to you.

12- Pain will come sharp and sudden, like knives in your chest. Let it be reminder, not prophecy. Pain says you are alive, not that you are finished.

13- Memory will betray you. You will recall the clean ease of air, the thoughtless way lungs once worked. That memory is both curse and gift. Curse because it sharpens longing. Gift because it whispers proof that breathing has been done before, and may be done again.

14- Close your eyes. The darkness is already here—closing them only makes it yours. In darkness, vision returns differently: the body remembers itself, not the world.

15- If fear tells you you are drowning, tell it: Not yet. That small defiance is enough to widen one more second, one more breath.

16- Water has no interest in you. It does not conspire, does not hate, does not save. It only is. Survival is not about bending the water to your will, but bending yourself into something the water will not unmake.

17- On the days you break—because you will—know that fragments can still float. Brokenness is not an anchor, unless you let it be.

18- Imagine gills. Even if you do not grow them, the imagining itself teaches the lungs a new rhythm. Pretend until the body half-believes. Pretend until survival begins to resemble instinct.

19- You will think of others who swim easily, who glide as though born for this. Do not measure yourself against them. Their waters are not yours. Their lungs are not your lungs. You are not late; you are alive.

20- If you ever reach the surface, breathe slowly. Do not rush. The air will feel foreign, as though you do not deserve it. Take it anyway. Inhale like a thief who has earned the crime.

21- And if you do not reach it—if the water stays, if the silence grows heavy—remember this: breathing underwater was always impossible. And yet, here you are, impossibly breathing.

22- This is not victory. It is persistence. And persistence, in the language of the drowned, is the closest thing to a prayer.