Outside of its most literal sense, when people talk about "drowning," it can mean a lot of things. When one of my closest friends from college texted me that she was drowning last summer, she felt strangled by the increasingly blurred lines between remote work and personal time. When a creative writing student of mine emailed me last fall that they were drowning, it was because they had found out their partner — whom they were bringing home to meet their family for the holidays — had a secret wife and child.
And when I wrote in my journal this winter that I felt a bit like I was drowning, I chided myself for being a dramatic because, moreso, I felt like I was just awash in a sea of seasonal blues that would occasionally manifest as random spikes of my body's "fight or flight" response; my stomach would sink and a random, visceral heat would spread from my cheeks down to my neck, before dispersing to my limbs. It was like my body was preparing to fight a burglar or run Scooby-Doo-style from a ghost, but in reality, I was just trying to make a morning cup of coffee.
