What is it like to feel alone in a room full of people, to suffocate on your own breath as if you gasp for air but each attempt to inhale is so asphyxiating that your eyes begin to water and you momentarily forget your own name? As you lie face-down in a pool filled with failed opportunities to speak up, you may believe that trying to communicate with others has successfully killed you. Instead of letting the fluidity of what you couldn’t say drown you, why not learn to swim?
When it seems as if others have turned your air into poison and that letting it consume you has come to feel like an anaphylactic shock without an adrenaline shot, you realize that you might as well already be dead, and that holding your breath feels like eternity.
If that’s the case, then hasn’t this eternity granted you the opportunity to forever fail your communications? Isn’t the pressure of failure finally off?
When you finally open your eyes, you can notice the sea of emerald green water made from words that were lost in your throat and never came out; eventually, the pool has drained and you cannot feel your tongue because it has swum away, only to have come back to you. When turned inside out, not unlike what happened to your T-shirt when you changed it this morning, your nightmares slowly become daydreams, and daydreams become reality, so where can you run in this inversion of security? How can you hide from what you cannot say when you can no longer hide inside yourself? What if insecurity has constructed an enclosure quite like a shark cage specifically for you by turning your world inside out? A world that looks real, has walls that taste familiar but are lined with hard metal bars that you never want your tongue to stick to?
We can stop trying to secure ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, then we can understand, when the water has become clearer, that a reflection of ourselves (our desire for security) is really the one responsible for our cement shoes pulling us deeper into the abyss of communication.
If the kingdom of your own voice starts falling down around you, or the shark of speaking clearly always bites at the cage when it’s time to clear your throat—when it’s time to get out of this inverted nightmarish prison you are in and speak—we must remember one thing. Instead of lying there, slowly forgetting your name, waiting for the water to evaporate, try to understand the importance of the doggy-paddle.