cold shower

 I think of a dip in icy water as coming back to the present. Nothing matters more in the moment than the chill your body is going through as if your system is shifting into override and the imminent danger is completely resetting your system. It doesn't matter where your mind is going and the most alarming worries. It's a feeling of reawakening.

As someone who suffered from anxiety for most of my life, thankfully I was blessed with a miracle last spring, as cold plunges still do it for me.

I first discovered my need and desire to just be in the water in high school when I started swimming every day of the week, and I would just feel the necessity, the desire to be in the water – inside the pool, I wouldn’t think, my body would finally relax and just move.

If I go a little bit back – when I was a kid, beach days were always me in the cold Atlantic water and either my cousin or my dad watching from the sand, and country days, even in the autumn, always meant cold showers outside with a hose. So maybe it was a childhood-implemented control thing that I didn’t even realize at the time and maybe, just maybe, now makes sense.

Now, my almost daily cold showers are a way to shift to reality, stop dreaming so much, and reset into the now I am living in that moment.

Now, deep in the ocean, even during winter, means a self-date to be completely and utterly just by myself and enjoy the solitude and the water washing away any pain, it is like a therapy session, and sometimes, truly, I even talk with the ocean and ask it to wash the pain and crushed dreams away, and sometimes, crazy, it is like it answers me back, asking for forgiveness that it is not even its and asking to clean my little hurt away, showing me the beauty of the waves, the wind and the sun. I sing to it, normally a song I just make at the moment, telling it and the wind what is going on in my little broken heart, with the rhythm and melody of the waves and the beat of the little fish swimming around my legs.

The ocean, now, gives me butterflies. It is like I fell in love with it, so I could let go of old loves but not give myself to new ones. So, I went back to my first one, the creation, the nature, the ocean and sand and the sun and wind, the flowers and birds.