It takes years

Inertia — Nº182

Years of nothing, then everything all at once. It makes time a funny thing. What can happen between the ticks and tocks, the sunrises and sunsets. The beat of a slow dance as our shadows creep across the floor.

To some, time can feel like a place where dreams go to die, where hope shrivels under the merciless glare of reality. But the best dreams take years. Years of silence so poignant you spend days hearing your heartbeat as it fills with anxiety. Years of darkness so complete you forget what light looks like. Years of running, shouting, lungs burning, on a road that looks endless.

You do the best you can, but you get nothing back. You fail. You fail again. Each failure a little death, each setback an imagined scar to remember. You shrink, fold inwards, become smaller than you expected at this point. But still, you persist. Even when the world seems deaf to your effort and blind to your struggles.

Until one day, it happens.

Going through long, difficult moments is akin to a kid learning to swim, an analogy expressed by Heather Havrilesky; for a long time, you think you’ll drown the moment your head falls underwater. You keep your eyes and mouth an inch above the surface, putting more effort than it’s worth into what you say is a battle to stay alive. It’s inefficient. But eventually, once you learn to lower your face into the water, the whole situation turns from something terrifying into an sigh of relief. Suddenly you feel buyont and exhilerated. Where the surface looked vast and violent, you found calm and quiet underneath.

One handshake, one mindset shift, or one piece of work changes everything. The road ends. The silence shatters. The darkness lifts. Years of ‘nothing’ now made everything so much greater—and oh, how sweet it is. This nothing was actually the spice that made this moment more. The contrast now is stark, beautiful, almost painful in its intensity.

Months or years of nothing breeds circular thoughts—leaving you wondering why you’re exhausted and angry. Despite seeing other people bobbing their heads underwater and emerging more relaxed and happier, you remain cynical and tired. You overthink until you feel terrible, you focus on blame, you stop smiling and laughing for the sake of it, and more time passes to makes you feel even worse, restarting this cycle.

I learned that when you’re going through long periods of struggle with seemingly no end, welcome the fact that this is where you are. Accept your feelings and cry instead of retreating to solutions of endless commentary, self-doubt and self-blame—telling yourself this is just the way it is in a world where everything is made up and at one point, no rules existed.

Put your head in the water and bathe off the poorly formed identity you have of yourself. If you sit watch other angelic swimmers wondering why you are not them, you will sink like a stone. Your identity is not what other people see or think about you but what’s simply on your road. It’s your thoughts, your idea of freedom, and what makes sense to you alone. Turning that into something beautiful takes time and that is why the road can feel never-ending. You’ll hit blocks of anxiety and struggle along the way, you will feel deserted and doubted. You need to understand what this means and feels like, and then keep moving forward. Because when it all clicks, your only regret will be that you didn’t dream bigger.