The Undertow: How calm can hide chaos, and why I choose to step into the wave
The Undertow
How calm can hide chaos, and why I choose to step into the wave
People sometimes tell me I’m so calm.
I’m not.
What they see is not serenity. It’s something else. Something quieter and more dangerous.
After my son, Jonah died, I became less volatile. The outbursts faded. I stopped sweating the “small stuff.” I simply didn’t have the energy to care about the things others seemed to find important—routine haircuts, fashion, whether my kids did their homework, or if the grass stayed trimmed. My therapist calls it complex PTSD. Ongoing. Complicated.
Years ago, I traveled to Mexico. One afternoon, our touring group visited a beach. Local lifeguards were stationed along the shore, urgently warning tourists to stay away from a certain stretch of water. If anyone drifted too close, the guards would rush over, ushering them backward with serious, practiced urgency. Further out, lifeguard boats bobbed on the waves, anchored about a hundred yards from shore.
To an untrained eye, the ocean looked harmless. Beautiful, even. The surface swayed and shimmered gently in the sun—calm, inviting. But the locals explained, in broken English, that beneath the stillness lay a deadly undertow. An invisible current strong enough to drag a full-grown person to the ocean floor. Tourists often ignored the warnings. And people died there. Regularly. That stretch of water was always watched. Always guarded.
That’s the best way I can explain my calm.
There’s a churning underneath. A relentless pull. I live with the risk of being carried away by it. My routines, my coping strategies—they’re the lifeguards. Holding the line. Watching the waves.
But here’s the truth.
I stepped into that water.
The guards were busy keeping their eyes on the bold, posturing twenty-something men—those obvious risks showing off for one another on the beach. No one suspected that a quiet, thirty-something mom would walk straight into the danger. I slipped past them unnoticed.
The water was only up to my knees when I felt it—those hidden tentacles wrapping around my ankles. In an instant, I was yanked beneath fifteen feet of ocean. The current scraped me across the sandy bottom, tumbling me like a piece of discarded paper. And then, as if I wasn’t even worth keeping, the sea spit me back out—flung me, really—onto the shore. Like a mother scolding a child for wandering too far.
I scrambled away like a panicked crab, coughing, ears and nose packed with sand. My bikini was twisted, my limbs burning with scrapes. Every crevice of my body was filled with grit.
And yet—what I remember most is the moment before the crash.
Suspended. Weightless. Hovering on the crest of a wave, my feet above my head, sunlight streaming through the water, turning it golden. That split second when my sea-kissed face met the sky.
I think of that moment often. I think of the soreness in my neck afterward, the tenderness of skin scratched raw, and somehow—I feel a kind of nostalgia. Not regret. Not shame. Because as foolish and risky as it was to step into that water, I know I dared.
I went in.
And maybe that’s the design of my soul. Maybe, before I incarnated, I signed the contract and said:
“Give me the whole thing. I want to know it. The crash and the flight. The sand in my lungs and the sunlight on my face. Let me feel it all.”
Maybe that’s what I came here for.
If this story resonates with you, you're not alone.
Whether you're standing on the shore or tumbling in the waves, there’s something brave in simply being here. Feel it. Name it.
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