Mind underwater

The Mind Underwater

The ground didn’t just stop me.

It swallowed me.

Impact wasn’t a moment — it was a breach. The brightness collapsed, the air thinned, and before I could brace, the world gave way beneath me. I didn’t land on the ground. I fell through it.

And underneath it was water.

Cold.

Dark.

Bottomless.

The mind doesn’t crash when it hits the ground.

It sinks.

I didn’t descend into the underwater mind.

I was dropped into it.

The first sensation was shock — the kind that steals breath before you even realize you’re holding it. The cold hit my thoughts first, numbing them, slowing them, dragging them down. Everything that had been too bright became too dim. Everything that had been too fast became impossibly slow.

There was no surface.

No direction.

No path out.

Just water pressing in from all sides.

Thoughts didn’t disappear.

They drifted — heavy, sluggish, ungraspable.

Every idea felt like it was wrapped in wet cloth.

Every intention felt waterlogged.

This wasn’t fog.

Fog is gentle.

Fog is air.

This was drowning without dying.

The simple fact is:

I can’t swim.

Not here.

Not in this kind of mind.

Not in this kind of weather.

My body felt too heavy to lift. My limbs didn’t respond the way they should. Even breathing felt like a negotiation — slow, strained, deliberate. Each inhale felt like pulling air through a collapsing straw. Each exhale felt like losing something I couldn’t afford to lose.

Sound changed too.

Voices reached me like echoes from another world.

My children’s words sounded warped, distant, as if they were speaking through glass.

Even silence felt thick, like it had weight.

I could see them.

I just couldn’t reach them.

That was the worst part —

not the sinking,

not the cold,

not the pressure.

The distance.

The underwater mind makes everything feel far away.

People.

Tasks.

Thoughts.

Myself.

It’s not despair.

It’s not numbness.

It’s submersion.

A state where the world continues above the surface, but I am below it — watching, listening, trying to rise, but unable to break through.

There is no clear path out.

No ladder.

No rope.

No light to swim toward.

Just the slow, heavy truth of being underwater in a mind that has lost its buoyancy.

This is the ground.

Not solid.

Not stable.

Not safe.

The ground is a sea.

And I am in it without the skills to navigate.

The mind underwater is not a place I choose.

It’s a place I land when the sky is gone.

And down here, everything is muted.

Everything is heavy.

Everything is slow.

Everything is dark.

This is the weather of the ground.

And it does not care whether I can swim.