1173 || escaping the riptide of despair: patreon preview

Sometimes I’m painfully reminded that hope is really all we have. When I am suffering most from the effects of grief, the hopelessness becomes overbearing and all-consuming. It feels impossible to avoid and it typically makes me feel like that’s how things will “always” be.

This is why, I often encourage myself (and others) to take action as a reminder that there is more than overthinking and dwelling in despair. The “touch grass” advice is always so funny to me - because that’s really all it takes sometimes. And maybe for you it’s not grass, because, if I’m honest, it’s not grass for me, either. But it is as small and accessible as grass - so I count it. Sometimes it’s the fresh air itself - reminding me that the world is still spinning. Other times it’s watching strangers going about their day - reminding me that the world is still spinning. But it’s always subtle, it’s always incomprehensibly tiny + it still seems to affect me so deeply. I think of all negative emotions, but especially hopelessness, like a ripcurrent.

The more you resist it, the more it will exhaust all of your resources and cause you to panic and drown. You are really meant to let it sweep you away for a moment, then swim alongside it calmly for another, and then when you see it begin to clear, you can head safely to the shoreline with less struggle and resistance and pain.

But it’s our natural inclination to swim against the current. To get the fuck out as fast as possible, and that would be back the way we came. But that’s not how emotions or riptides work.

Similarly to a rip current, they are smooth looking on the surface but have traumatic and extreme conditions, right underneath - too deep to identify clearly but too powerful to resist logically. So we must get comfortable discarding logic every once in a while. We must learn to let the tides take us, and lean into the fear rather than the panic. To allow ourselves to flow with the current conditions + then, when it’s safe to do so, reflect + adjust our patterns to adapt to the new environment.

Because sometimes, like a riptide, it can be more dangerous to resist the environment than it is to allow it to move us before we move away from it.

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The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

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