My Mental Health Needs Water to Survive

Up here, my anxiety has gotten worse in the past year or so. To the point where I’m thinking I might need to go back to therapy. I feel I’m becoming unhealthy at the edges again. I’m afraid almost more than I’m not. That’s all up here.

Under, it’s different.

I stride into the warm salt water, just far enough that I can turn around to the shore and I’m buoyant. I slip on one fin, then the other. I continue to walk backwards, towards the reef, while I spit into my mask, rinse it, and tug it into place. I clear my snorkel. And I turn toward the vast and open seas.

My face hits the water, and I’m a mermaid, a fish, a sea creature alien, observing the sand, the sea grass, the conch shells. My eyes take on more than they do up above; my peripheral vision catches every dart, flash, tiny speck of movement. I glide effortlessly and silently, breathing deeply. Inhale, exhale. Repeat. A calm ocean rhythm, like the ebb and the flow, the current that pulses me forward and gently pushes me back. The sea and I. We are one.

Up ahead, the reef rises from the seabed as a quarry of dark and indiscriminate boulders. As I advance, the boulders change, to olive-shaded brains and grape-colored fans. Schools of tiny sergeant majors face toward the current, as still as statues. Waiting for the chance to dash ‘en masse’. An opalescent parrot fish, flashing neon colors I could never imagine up there, chomps at a coral outcrop. Crunching. Crunching I can hear under water. I wonder how sharp their little teeth are, how powerful are their jaws. The ocean’s little piggy clowns, always eating, always chomping.

Luminescent black-light blue tangs dart between branches, their paper-thin bodies almost vanishing as they retreat. They are almost the absence of light, a shade one may expect to see glowing in the darkest points of outer space.

Hello my friends, I breathe. I love you. I’ve missed you.

Out pops a tentacled sea anemone, waving and dancing in a frenetic double time, not waiting for the current to guide it. At the tip of each tentacle is a bright yellow highlighter, glowing in the sun-dappled current. Curious, I float above, watching the dots appear and retreat. The anemone is a stranger amongst the coral garden; no, I am the stranger, and neither of us is afraid. We are…we are simply one.

The light from above creates its own shadow play, and dark crevices flicker gold as the waves meet the sun’s glare. In the strobe I spot a spiny lobster under a coral vase, but the next time the light exposes it, only the claw is visible in the grainy sand.

As I scour the sand I spot them, first one, then ten, then fifty. Starfish, lounging in the space between two coral gardens, looking to the world like Dali paintings, melting into whatever surface they rest upon. As many stars per inch, I estimate, than in the Milky Way, or so it seems in the flipside of the Under.

The current and a few kicks of my fins take me over another reef bank, and I swim into a school of grunts. Grunts, I whisper to them, and we laugh. They know what I’m thinking: what an indelicate name for creatures that don the stripes of sun and sea! I watch them while they go about their academic business, studying all day, scholars each and every one. I’m the new kid in class, but not really an outcast; they do, however, side eye me like they’re waiting for me to pull a faux pas.

I graduate from grunt school and float out near where the waves break. There’s more surge out here, and I’m rolling in rhythm with the waves, forward, back, forward…pause, and back. A blocky white puffer fish pops up from beneath a coral wall, and bobbles towards me. Despite their shape they are gracefully hydrodynamic, and this fellow is face to face with me only long enough for me to decipher the pattern of quills on his back. His black-button eyes stare me down, then just as quick as he appears, he darts away.

When I pull closer to the sea wall, I navigate my journey once again; while buoyant, I’m careful to avoid accidentally kicking any sentient being or stepping down on something spiky. In the under, there is no need for feet or arms. All the work is done by breath and fins.

As I approach a calcified outpost of coral, I spot something unusual. I stop and hover above it. It’s something I’ve never encountered in the under. I’ve seen poisonous jellies and urchins and know them by sight. I avoid them, respect them, allow them to protect themselves with their armor and stings. But this time, it’s a spotted scorpion fish—the most poisonous fish around—parking himself as still as the rock he’s chosen as his lair. At first glance, he isn’t alive…he isn’t moving, and his tiger-striped fins are clamped open as tight as venetian blinds. But this is when he is most deadly. He pretends to be rock, sand, coral, any type of animal life. He will be whatever you imagine him to be, and then he’ll inject you with toxins so vile you’re dead within hours.

It’s not without danger, the Under, but somehow, I find the danger predictable, more Mother Nature than human nature. Human nature is notoriously fickle. Above, our biggest danger is us. Meanwhile, the water swirls, ebbs, and flows, as it does and will continue to do. Whatever burden you carry, what weighs you down up there, is of no concern in the Under.