Depression does not arrive all at once. It builds slowly, quietly, like a rising tide. Standing at the water’s edge, each soft wave is small enough to ignore until the tide is high enough it can swallow you in. Into the darkness of murky water. Anxiety, by contrast, is not like the slow movement and fluidity of water, but a sudden siren piercing the silence in an empty street. A shrieking sound carrying dread that hits you with the force of a car crash in your mind.

One moment, you can feel like you’re winning the game of life, floating along feeling fantastic, weightless and free. Five minutes later, it’s like gravity returns all at once, forceful and unforgiving. A pressure heavy enough to crush you. An anvil on the chest, narrowing of breath and an uncertain certainty that something is not right.

Emotions are oceans filled with angry waves that crash into and around you, pushing you back and forth, up and down. Sometimes the water is calm. Other times it feels nearly impossible to just catch even the smallest breath.

The thing is, we can opt out at any time. That’s free will, right? We can decide when it all ends, when it has all become too much.

But where’s the fun in that?

These are the things that shape life, and make it all worth living. Challenges, obstacles, puzzles that we have to solve. Without those, what fun is the game? We can learn so much through each experience thrown at us, and through that we grow. I know it sounds so cliche, but it’s the truth. I want to be able to look at the life I’ve lived, and have there be stories to tell. How many stories could be told if I never completed any of these challenges? Maybe a few…probably not many worth a damn, though. The important thing is that we continue to push through. Take a moment to reflect, breathe, relax, carry on.

It’s normal for us to feel these ways. It’s what makes us human. If we didn’t, well…that would be strange. For a time, these forces such as anxiety, depression, panic, stress and dread, can shape the landscape of a person’s life, narrowing our routines, shrinking ambitions, convincing us that retreat is safer than movement. But there is always emergence from these deep, dark places we at times find ourselves in. Like nature, we weather the cold of winter, adapting and embracing the change, for it is the natural flow of life, and all that is happening is for a reason.

Snow does not kill the flowers in anger. It brings a temporary death to their vibrance. From above, the field appears empty, colorless, finished. The stems collapse. The petals rot back into the soil. It feels permanent. But underground, the roots are not gone. They are conserving. The cold that seemed destructive is also protective, insulating what cannot survive the open air. And when the thaw comes, the ground loosens. Water runs where ice once held them back. Shoots press upward through soil that only weeks before looked sealed shut.

The ebb and flow remains, but if you can begin to recognize that the tide is never permanent, and that you are not forever fixed in the lowest point of it, that is when you can begin to feel confident in who you are, and life can flow as it needs to. It’s so important to remember the impermanence.

Emergence works in these ways. That harsh winter, flattening what once felt alive. The violent storm, ripping through, closing doors of the mind, blocking the sun and stirring up emotions. It can freeze your movement entirely. Yet behind it all, something remains intact. When the winds or temperatures shift, or when the sun returns with its warm glow, what was buried begins again, because it endures.

I know I will weather the storm, because I have always loved the rain.