Black Ink and Parchment

There are burdens so carefully hidden that the world mistakes us for weightless. We tread water with practiced grace moving through life as though nothing inside us aches. Because pain carried beneath the surface becomes easy for others to ignore. People cannot see every responsibility, illness, or expectation lurking beneath the surface.  

People assume that because we keep our heads above water, we must not be struggling. They mistake survival for ease. They see the calm ripples on the surface and never think to ask what exhaustion lurks underneath, but hidden things are often the heaviest anchors.

We carry expectations tied carefully to our ankles or have been gifted responsibilities like stones sitting in our pockets while we struggle to stay afloat. The career that takes everything out of us by the end of the day. The depression that swims around us is waiting to pull us under while balancing our children’s schedules, our partner’s needs, and our own goals, hoping no one sees we are sinking.

And because we continue carrying them, people assume we have room for more. After all, you are still swimming. But people rarely understand how hard someone may be kicking beneath the surface just to avoid drowning. The strongest swimmers are often the ones closest to exhaustion. Remember a person can be swallowing water in silence while still appearing to be calm from shore.  

So why don’t people say something if they are drowning? Because sometimes the heaviest weight of all is guilt. We are taught that love means becoming a life raft for everyone else. We want to pull people safely to shore. When we cannot, we feel like failures and suddenly we fear being seen as lazy, cold, or selfish simply because we could not drag another person to shore while barely staying afloat ourselves.

But there is already too much grief, expectation, and pain in this world for one person to carry it all without eventually sinking. Sometimes when someone says no, it is not because they do not care. Do you know how difficult it is to admit you are drowning in a world that keeps insisting you are such a strong swimmer?

Maybe if we stopped judging the smiles, the appearances, and the illusion of effortless floating, resentment would disappear. Maybe if we understood that some people are treading water with weights tied to their ankles and rocks in their pockets, we would offer more grace instead of more demands. 

Life was never meant to be lived drowning beneath guilt, desperately trying to keep everyone else afloat while forgetting that you deserve air first.