“How do we tell the sea that we’re drowning on land?” — Ken Alexandar Ishii-Milovanov
The ocean knows something about suffering.
It knows the weight of what’s carried beneath the surface. It knows how to rise. How to pull everything in and still go unnoticed. How to crash, loudly, then retreat as if nothing happened.
Sometimes I wonder if the sea would understand me better than the people I live among. If I stood at the shoreline, salt in my throat, and whispered everything I’ve been holding…would it echo something back? Would it know how to keep me?
Because lately, I feel like I’m drowning.
Not in water—but in expectation.
In the ache of trying to stay soft in a world that rewards sharpness.
In days that blur into each other, in the noise of headlines, in the loneliness of rooms where I smile too much just to seem okay.
And the hardest part is:
no one can see it.
There’s no soaked hair. No gasping breath. No lifeguard on duty.
Just the quiet suffocation of being unable to surface.
So how do we tell the sea? How do we explain a kind of drowning that leaves no visible trace?
Maybe we don’t.
Maybe we just go to her, barefoot and trembling, and let her speak first. Let her remind us what it means to move, to rise, to rest.
Maybe healing starts with standing at the edge of something vast and admitting we need help breathing again.
And that’s permission enough.
