Catching Your Breath

Honesty is its own kind of medicine. When we’re honest about our journeys, we open the way for others to step into their own truth. We normalize everyone’s experience and then each one of us can realize that we are not alone. So here I am sharing my own medicine, my own way of connecing to the ocean of emotions that stirs within....writing. I wrote this in five days; each morning getting up and writing a few sentences about my breath that I couldn't seem to catch. 📷📷​

Have you ever had a moment that took your breath away? A moment that you swear you stopped breathing completely for an ungodly amount of time. But it was just a moment, gone in a few seconds.

A moment where, for better or worse, you were sure that life was never going to be the same?

But your breath, it returns. Sometimes swiftly and at a wild pace. Other times deep and steady.

In both scenarios your breath is preparing you for the next blow. One says go - run. The other, stay - be solid.

I pray for the solid breath. The slow steadiness of a deep inhale and slow deliberate exhale.

What I pray for is not what I always get.

Some mornings I let the moment get the best of me and my inhales get stuck and exhales become non-existent.

Over and over again I try to catch my breath.

My heart beats hysterically. Everything is constricted and too close. The walls, the roof, the trees, the neighbors, this town…it’s all too fucking close.

I need room to breathe.

I need room to breathe.

I need room to breathe.

I run to the ocean. It’s vastness like a life raft.

I row and I row until the land is but a speck on the horizon. And finally, I can breathe.

The salt in the air like tiny expanders for my lungs.

The coolness coming off the water like refuge for the heat in my head.

I’ll never go back. I’ll stay here forever.

I’ll become a wave, flowing in and out with the tides.

My breath is the fog that lingers above the water.

My breath now thick, slow, deliberate. Surrounds this town.

An obscure barrier between.

Distorting my ability to see clearly.

Where those moments that take your breath away become unreal.

📷📷​​