The Pull You Didn't Choose

I was sitting in one of my favorite spots, my therapist couch, I grabbed the blanket laid it over my lap, and like every week she asked how I was. I surprised myself when I said I feel heavy. I had no other word. Heavy is the only word that I could think of. She then challenged me to visualize that I was standing in water, in a current.

So imagine this, you're wading in the water. It feels calm around your ankles, nice and gentle so you start to get curious and take a few steps deeper, and then a few steps deeper you feel it — a pull sideways, quiet at first, easy to miss. By the time you notice, you're already off course. Not drowning, not in danger exactly, just further from where you meant to be, working twice as hard to get back. You've hit a current.

Currents don't announce themselves. They often times cannot be seen. They move patiently, stealthy, and many times stronger than people realize. You feel heavier than you did before you stepped into the water.

Sometimes we’ve been standing in some currents for so long that we don’t even notice how exhausted we are. Most of us are standing in a current right now without fully realizing it. The current of comparison, that keeps pulling your attention to someone else's definition of "enough." The current of urgency, that convinces you everything needs a response, a reaction, an opinion, right now. The current of other people's expectations, which is maybe the strongest one of all. None of these currents ask permission. They just tug, gently and constantly.

The instinct, when you notice you've drifted, is usually to panic and fight the water head-on — swim hard, straight back to where you started. It exhausts you and the current doesn't care. What works instead is smaller and less dramatic: you stop fighting the whole current at once, you find your footing, and you move at an angle — deliberately, a little sideways — until you're out of the pull. You find solid ground on the bank or shore.

Staying away from the pull might be closing down a "doom scroll" session because you realize all the negativity or are comparing, it may look like taking time for yourself even when others urgency may seem like your own, it may be speaking your truth even when it goes against the grain, or simply doing the quiet work that not many people notice, because it is making the biggest difference.

The goal is never to feel nothing when the current pulls. It's to have something under your feet solid enough that you can feel the pull, name it, and choose to move to solid ground. Whatever it is, it needs to be built before you're standing in the water, not while you're already being pulled. Nobody finds their footing for the first time in the middle of a current. Trust yourself, lean into your people, ask for help (I need to take my own advice), find your solid.

So the question worth sitting with isn't really "how strong is the current today." It's always strong, in one form or another. The question is what you've built to stand on — and whether you've checked lately if it's still there. I know I am building my ground one day at a time.

Be Kind. Give Grace. Spread Love.

Alysia