Underwater

At fifteen, not having social media feels a little like living underwater- you can see the currents of the world rushing above you, but you move through something not so dissimilar but certainly slower, thicker, and quieter; something more viscous, would be the appropriate word. 

It feels like everyone my age is building a kind of second skin there while I exist only here, offline- fully real but atypically invisible. And the worst thing about being real and invisible is - people only look at the invisible part. 

What makes it harder is that I wasn’t always disconnected. I had a taste of that sweet, dizzying high - of belonging, of being seen - and then, in a heartbeat, it was taken away. It left me in a strange, withdrawn state, moving through a life that now feels jarringly slow and startlingly inconvenient. 

Admittedly, there are loads of people out there who will tell you that a kind of quiet bliss called silence almost envelopes you in its quiet embrace but the stark reality is that this embrace is hardly quiet - it’s more sharp, surgical at times, and it carves you further away from a world that never even turned its head to see you leave.

Bringing back the analogy of water, I sometimes wonder if I'm stuck in a riptide, pulled away from the shore of connection and community- the fundamental human need, the oxygen that fuels our souls, the lifeblood that courses through our veins. Without it, aren’t we all but unmoored ships, floating in the void?

Or perhaps I'm just swimming against the tide, trying to find my own way in a world that's increasingly online. 

The truth is, being underwater - being offline - is a strange, liminal existence. It doesn’t make me deeper or wiser or better. It just makes me different - and at fifteen, different is a heavy thing to carry.

As I navigate the uncharted territories of underwater, I'm constantly buffeted by currents of doubt and uncertainty. Will I ever find my way back to the shore, or will I remain suspended in this viscous limbo? The water pressure builds, and I feel the weight of my isolation.

Ha, and they say everything feels lighter in water.

Yet, in the darkness, I glimpse fleeting moments of clarity - like bioluminescent plankton that fluoresce when alarmed. Tiny sparks of understanding that illuminate the water around me, thinning the viscosity just enough to let me breathe.

But like most beautiful things in life, they are painfully and tantalizingly short-lived.

Still, the yearning remains - the insatiable pull toward connection, toward the flow of human experience that surges so effortlessly through the digital world. My thoughts and feelings swirl in isolation, unable to escape the confines of my own mind, unable to find their way home like salmon spawn do when they grow up.

Without it, I feel like a stagnant pool, cut off from the ocean's currents. 

This desire for flow, I understand, is primal - a need to be part of something larger than myself. 

Maybe surviving underwater won’t make me stronger. Maybe it will just leave me quieter. A little heavier. A little slower to surface the next time.

Because no matter how much I swim, no matter how hard I reach toward the currents above, the world moves on without noticing. And maybe that's the hardest part — knowing that even if I made it back to shore, I wouldn’t be the same. And the shore wouldn’t be waiting.

It’s easy to get lost in the whirlpool of social media — but it's even easier to get lost in the whirlpool of yourself.

And out here, underwater, it’s hard to tell which way is up anymore.

Written by Nivrrithi Arvindkumar