Let me taste the salt you breathed
While you were underneath
There are some moments in the human experience that make us simply wonder why we were put on this planet to endure such suffering without our consent. It might be when you fight for your life during a near death experience or you beg for God to allow you to die because this pain is too much.
There are spouts of suffering that crawl deep within you and seem to take over. There are times you feel both possessed and like a ghost itself. No matter what, you feel this life was given to you, not as a gift but as a Greek. You can be perfectly coherent one day, then wake up and have the sky be a different color, darker and less welcoming. Life feels like the most uncomfortable hug from the most unsettling person; it’s so close to you, pressed up against you, and you can’t back away or catch your breath. You try to ignore it and smell the flowers, but the scent of decay crawls its way inside instead. There is nowhere else for you to look; the black hole has swallowed the rest of your vision. Soon enough, it will take the rest of you with it wherever it is going.
Everyone needs a moment that utterly takes their breath away from them, and not in a good way — in a way that it feels like your breath is being stolen by the experience. It is taking something that was yours and is making it theirs now. It feels like you don’t live through bad experiences; instead, they happen to you, with force and without reprimand. One moment in particular needs to have the same impact on you as when your stomach gives out from a rollercoaster drop, or when you receive a horrific grade that can’t be made up no matter how hard you try, or when someone you love dies and you can never say goodbye to them.
Have you ever grieved a moment before?
You need moments that take you by the horns and teach you that this life is not yours and it never was yours. You were merely a pawn for life to exact its evil desires onto. You realize you were put on this earth not to love, but to wonder what it could be the whole time. Because, life does a funny job of taking away from you the one thing you need.
There needs to be a moment when the bad parts add up to one horrific conglomeration — one that can’t be avoided this time. You can’t swerve out of the way, you can’t duck to dodge it; it’s the feeling of seeing a punch come towards you in the slow motion, but the powerlessness of your reflexes being too slow to move or stop it, so in that in between period, you must accept you are going to get hurt. In fact, you must witness it as well. You just have to stand there and watch as someone wins over you while you have no say in it at all.
Maybe people can learn lessons without being pushed to the brink. Maybe these combinations of horrible events metastasizing into an unplayable beast aren’t necessary — and are instead indicative of a lack of learning ability. The small animals at the time were too insignificant to tackle, but when they bring all their friends to thus attack you, you really wish you just fought off the smaller animals earlier.
The moment I am referring to is a rock bottom moment. It is the time where all of your bad defense and coping mechanisms can’t be ignored anymore — they are neglected, they are angry, and they are vengeful. Do not think of it as an enemy, but a very harsh friend. It is your latent potential, being upset at you for denying it of its power. Your potential within you sees how much of yourself you are wasting, and at first, it is patient with this. It gives you time to figure it out yourself; it gives you some independent work time. This happens as long as it needs to happen, and as long as you continue to not listen to the words that are being spoken through the wind, the more this latent potential will become restless and annoyed. It sees you diminish yourself daily and ignore the warnings and premonitions of the earth. You have noise cancelling headphones on, but outside is so, so noisy. You must know you cannot escape this sound forever, and sooner or later, the headphones will come off.
If you cannot regulate yourself and every time you look inside of yourself, you become two steps behind, then the kettle will start to boil over. And something terrible will happen. Something terrible you will want to be able to forget, but now all of a sudden, you can’t control what you don’t remember anymore. Now, it is being decided for you, because you waited too long.
Moments of rock bottom are scary and most of all, embarrassing. It says, “I ignored all of the little signs until it became too much. I lost all control of my inner facilities.” If you think you have lost yourself now, wait until your rock bottom moment happens.
This is when the process of grief starts, and instead of grieving a person, you grieve an experience. You grieve over how you could’ve prevented this and you didn’t have to die in this way. The thing is, everyone dies, but some die with 600 stab wounds from torture, and others die blissfully in their sleep. A rock bottom moment is the purest form of torture done by yourself to yourself.
The thing is, I’m not stating that rock bottoms should be avoided. Of course, I am nagging you for getting to the point of a rock bottom, but this moment is so important and unique. Because at this point, it doesn’t matter what you have done in the past. All of that is erased, and all that matters now is what you do in the present.
This is a win. What you just did was kill off your old self, which couldn’t have been possible before. What just happened is nothing short of a suicide without your physical body dying. And what comes after dying? Rebirth.
Sometimes bad coping mechanisms cannot be cut out until it is too late. That is why people start to be helped when they join Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous; it is because they have reached their rock bottom and genuinely want to get better. When you look in the mirror after your rock bottom and hate the reflection, the only thing left to do is erase the aspect from your reflection that you hate.
You cannot live being afraid of your reflection. Your latent potential wants you to be the strongest you can be, so it gave you the strongest pain it could conceive. A seed cannot sprout until it has been buried.
It’s an act of secondary succession. You were destroyed by a natural disaster, and now it is time to rebuild. All the roots are dead, all the fauna are gone, and the only way to get it back to what it was (or better) is to get up and start planting.
If anything, this should lessen your stress. Remember, if you have nothing left to lose, this gives you immense power. Your rock bottom moment already took everything you had left. This is when you find out that you have reserves, and slowly, your latent potential floats to the surface and is enough to be tangible. It begins to work as a shovel for you, as a tool to help you plant your seeds again, but it does not generate the strength needed to dig — that strength comes from you.
Nature does not get angry at the earth for giving them a natural disaster. It does not complain, nor does it try to make the problem worse. It does the only thing it knows how — grow.
A dish must be scraped clean before it can be eaten off again. A field must be cleared if new species are supposed to be bloom there. A mind must be rinsed if new ideas and mentalities are supposed to be there.
We tend to think of the world as a cruel being, but maybe it’s more of a standoffish parent. It wants you to learn the lessons, but won’t do much to help you learn them. Either you get the lessons the first time, over several times, or at the last moment it’s possible to understand. Just like Nature flows, so must we. We cannot be something for too long, especially if it’s not who we truly are.
Many scientists connect physical pains to emotional pains. Know that if you feel immense discomfort, can’t sleep, can’t produce art, or have a lot of back or body pain, that that is just your potential trying to claw itself out. You are suppressing an important aspect of yourself — who you truly are and what your journey is supposed to be. We try to squeeze life into our own pre-cut boxes, not knowing life is cut into different pieces. We cannot try to bend life to our wishes, which include sitting around all day and thinking nothing, because our wishes are superficial and lackluster. Life bends you, but only because it knows better than you.
The worst thing that ever happened to you can be the greatest, just as long as you listen to hear the hints in the wind and the waves.
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