The Sand Underneath My Toes

I can’t really explain it. Since I was a kid I wanted to be close to the ocean. Feeling the sun on my skin and the clean sea air in my lungs. Sinking my feet into the warm sand, sucking me in, making me feel safe. When I see the ocean I feel endless. Free. 

I guess anyone would strive to have this feeling in their life. 

I tried to feel like this at the place where I grew up. I tried to find the same sense of belonging. But instead, I felt the increasing despair of not being able to find it anywhere, hollowing out the places of hope inside of me. I felt like I was losing my connection to life. I couldn’t hold onto the person I wanted to be. It became a terrifying process, really.

At first, I thought it was my fault, for not trying hard enough. In the end, everyone around me was happy and fine with where they were. I was just being lazy for wanting a vacation all the time. 

Sometimes, when I really needed to escape, I lay in bed and imagined the shore. The sand underneath my toes. 

I mean, who wouldn’t like to live on a tropical island rather than in a big gray city?

But in my case it was different. It wasn’t merely something that I would like to have in my life. It was the base for me to function. Without it, I didn’t feel like myself. I was so confused by the differences between my moods and other people’s moods, my thoughts and their thoughts. My parents got worried. I got worried. 

I read about people getting more depressed in countries that don’t have a lot of sunlight. I thought that if this was life, and if this was how life feels every day, I can’t do it. I can’t take it. 

I decided to go to the doctor. Being diagnosed lifted a lot of fear and uncertainty from my shoulders. It wasn’t some scary unknown phenomenon that was happening to me, it was just me, going through depression. All that emptiness and hopelessness, the lack of perspective, it wasn’t my fault. It was a mental illness that needed treatment. 

I told myself that the idea of my tropical paradise was just wishful thinking. It wouldn’t actually make me feel better to live close to the ocean, in a place where the sun always shines. I would end up carrying my depression with me to any place in the world. 

Then, for the first time after 5 years, I was able to afford a trip. It was overwhelming to stand on the shore after such a long time. To tremble and cry with relief and yet fear the moment that would push me back into the car, back to the place I was forced to call “home”. I felt like the warmth of the sun was filling me with light, like the sound of the ocean washed away any darkness that polluted my soul.

You can’t instantly cure depression by standing on a beach. The realization that it wasn’t mental illness after all was devastating.

It meant I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t try harder and I couldn’t treat it. 

I had to go.

A lot of people didn’t understand. It felt so lonely to be perceived as a reckless dreamer who wants to follow their heart. How could I possibly explain the urgency screaming in every single inch of my being? How could I ever tell anyone that staying where I was felt life-threatening? I was scared to tell my loved ones I feared that I could end my own life if that feeling of hollowness kept consuming who I was and took over the control of my thoughts.

And while the incomprehension of some seemed cruel to me, suddenly, I had a glimpse of hope that kept growing and dragged me through the days, going faster and faster, crushing any obstacle I found to be in my way.

I had made my decision. I would go. I would leave everything and everyone behind to save myself.

Now I know that sounds dramatic. But I had been too close to absolute emptiness to be unsure about what I needed to do. I thought about the eery absence of meaning when my family told me to stay. I heard the roaring silence of numbness when I broke up with my partner. I thought about all the lack of joy inhabiting the things I could buy with money when I quit my job. And the everlasting foreignness of “home” when I gave up my apartment. 

Nothing made sense in the place where I was.

So why should I?

As I was counting the days to my departure, a familiar fear ripped a hole into my peace of mind. I could hear it whisper:

“You will leave, but nothing will change.”

“This sickness will come with you and consume every last part of you until nothing is left.”

What if by going I was depriving myself of the only hope that was keeping me alive?

What if it was me after all?

A sinister abyss opened up before me. I was sure that I couldn’t cope with this being true. As long as I stayed, at least I could make myself believe that there was hope for my life being better if only I would be somewhere else. But it was too late to step back. 

I had made my decision and I had to leave. 

I will remember it forever; the moment when the plane tilted and all I could see through the tiny round window was the golden sunlight reflecting from an endless ocean. And there, right in the middle of the Atlantic, was the island I had laid all my hopes in. 

Now as I stand by the ocean, feeling the sun, the air, the warm sand underneath my toes, the endlessness, I know that I have grown into the person I always felt I have to be at the bottom of my soul.

Now that four years have passed, I know that the emptiness and darkness won’t haunt me here. Though sometimes it’s hard to ignore the voice in my ear that keeps saying “Wake up. Wake up, please, wake up”.