Drowning

When pressure rises and the waters close in, survival isn’t about escape — it’s about learning how to breathe where you stand.

Today didn’t start as a battle, but it turned into one anyway. I was already in job-search mode before the day even unfolded — a quiet admission to myself that something in my work environment had shifted. Someone had stepped into a position of authority over me earlier this week — fairly recent, just a few days — and almost immediately it felt less like collaboration and more like a tightening grip. Every exchange carried the weight of hierarchy. My paycheck, my household stability, and my sense of footing all felt tethered to a dynamic where I was expected to absorb pressure without resistance.

There were moments where I wasn’t just interrupted — I was erased mid-sentence. Fixed viewpoints met every attempt I made to explain myself. I could feel the imbalance like a physical force. Authority narrowed the conversation into a corridor where only one voice was meant to travel. With every word spoken over me, it felt like I was being pushed underwater, lungs burning, fighting for a brief pocket of air just to state what was true.

That feeling that’s hard to name? That’s drowning without spectacle. No dramatic crash. No cinematic disaster. Just the slow compression of weight.

Most people assume drowning looks like panic. In reality, it often looks like composure. You go to work. You answer messages. You smile in the right places. But internally, you’re calculating how much longer you can hold tension without breaking. You are negotiating with gravity.

Standing up for yourself in that space isn’t heroic. It’s survival. I had to ration my energy, measure every word, and keep my voice steady while something inside me wanted to either collapse or detonate. There is a specific terror that comes when your livelihood is threaded through the mouth of the person speaking over you — when their interpretation of events can ripple directly into your home. Fear sits quietly in those moments, urging silence as a form of self-protection.

And here’s the paradox: the instinct is to thrash. To escape. To fix everything at once. To claw upward toward some imagined surface where things will finally be manageable.

But thrashing wastes oxygen.

Silence is its own kind of surrender, but so is reckless panic. Standing your ground inside pressure is not passive surrender. It is a deliberate act of control. It means recognizing that not every rising tide is meant to be outrun. Some tides are meant to be endured. You anchor your feet. You slow your breathing. You stop negotiating with fear long enough to observe it.

My viewpoints were eventually heard. The issue that sparked everything was resolved. For a second, it felt like breaking the surface after being held under too long. But relief is thin. Authority didn’t disappear with resolution. This person still stands over my day-to-day reality. They still hold the capacity to tilt the ground beneath me. Moving forward feels like walking across glass — every step deliberate, every movement cautious, aware that one misplacement could cut deep.

And all the while this was happening, something else was unfolding inside my body. My vision started to blur. I could feel it creeping in at the edges — the room softening, details dissolving. I’ve been on corticosteroids from being sick earlier last week, and I don’t know if that’s the cause or if something else is happening, but I am losing clarity in a literal sense. Everything is becoming hazy. It’s a physical echo of what the moment already felt like emotionally. I wasn’t just drowning metaphorically in the exchange — I felt like I was drowning inside my own body. My sight slipping, my voice strained, hurt stacking on top of pressure. The sensation was disorienting, like the world itself was filling with water.

And my day isn’t finished. The aftershock is still sitting in my chest like a weight I can’t set down. I don’t like this feeling. It reads like a warning — a signal to get something lined up, to prepare an exit even while I remain in place. Unease hums under everything I’m doing. I can’t shake it. It follows me from thought to thought, a low current of tension that refuses to dissipate. Even with the immediate conflict settled, the atmosphere hasn’t cleared. It’s thick, suspended, waiting.

I’m unsettled in a way that’s hard to ignore. I’m uncertain about the future of my job and what shape it’s going to take. Despite the small win of being heard, I’m not at peace with the fact that this person still has authority over me — someone I experience as rigid, bullheaded, and unwilling to bend. That reality sits heavy. It leaves me feeling at a loss, uneasy in a way that lingers beneath every thought. The victory was real, but it was small, and it didn’t dissolve the larger tension surrounding it.

She belittled me by fashioning my own words against me, twisting them back in a way that injected ugliness into the exchange. The tone was unmistakably condescending, and it carried the quiet sting of being diminished in real time.

I felt like I was drowning with every word she spoke over me, as she thwarted every attempt at my self-redemption. I rewatched the video of it all and could barely stand to look. Watching someone exercise power with that kind of nonchalance — to press down without hesitation — felt disgusting and deeply unsettling. It didn’t read as leadership. It read as force. And yet somehow, somewhere, she has convinced others otherwise. I’m left sitting with that contradiction, still underwater, still trying to understand how something that felt so wrong can exist so plainly in front of me.

I’m a chronic pain sufferer, and even though I was having a decent week physically, this may have set off my tension. In the background of all of this sits Leilani’s service this Sunday, and the ongoing weight of losing my mother — grief moving in both the foreground and the back of my mind at the same time. I did not need this battle today. This battle felt unnecessary. I shouldn’t have to fight for my job when it is already mine. I shouldn’t be thinking about leaving because of one horrible, miserable person.

Music credit:

https://pixabay.com/users/gavrilych-50379576/