everything you thought was drowning you was teaching you how to swim

it’s summer now. the ceiling fan has become a permanent soundtrack again, because the afternoons arrive swollen with heat and laziness, because the mangoes in my kitchen are ripening faster than i can eat them. when i step outside, the air feels thick enough to hold in my hands.

summer has always announced itself quietly.

not through calendars or solstices or official beginnings but through mundane things. through the way sunlight sits on the floor for longer. through the smell of wet plants after someone waters them in the evening. through the distant sound of children playing out in the sun when they should probably be inside.

through the realization that another year has somehow happened without asking my permission.

and maybe this is embarrassing to admit, but every summer of my life has felt like the beginning of something. even now. even at an age when i should probably know better. there is a part of me that still expects miracles in june. i still wake up and think maybe this will be the summer everything changes. maybe this will be the summer i become the person i’ve been trying to become. maybe this will be the summer i finally learn how to stop missing things. maybe this will be the summer i learn how to stay. maybe this will be the summer i stop treating my life like a waiting room.

i don’t know.

the thing nobody tells you about growing up is that seasons survive you.

you change. your friendships change. your body changes. the music you love changes. the things that break your heart change.

but summer remains stubbornly itself.

the same long afternoons. the same orange evenings. the same heat pressing against windows. the same promise hanging in the air. and every year it returns carrying a version of you that no longer exists. that is why nostalgia has never felt comforting to me. people talk about nostalgia as though it is warm. as though it is a blanket. as though it is opening an old photo album and smiling. but whenever i experience nostalgia, it feels closer to grief.

because what is nostalgia if not grief with nowhere to go? what is nostalgia if not loving something that no longer exists? i think people misunderstand what they miss. they say they miss childhood. i don’t think that’s true. i think what they miss is certainty. i think what they miss is believing the future is a room with all the lights on.

when i think about my childhood summers, i don’t remember anything extraordinary. i remember ordinary things with devastating clarity.

the sound of a pressure cooker from another room. the sting of chlorine in my eyes after swimming. the way my grandmother would cut fruit in the afternoon and place it in ceramic bowls. the sensation of running barefoot across cool floors. the taste of water after playing outside for too long. the specific shade of gold that existed at 6 p.m.

the feeling of lying in bed knowing tomorrow would look almost exactly like today.. and somehow that certainty felt infinite. as a child, i genuinely believed summers would keep arriving forever in the same shape. i thought my grandparents would always be alive. i thought my parents would always be young. i thought my friends and i would somehow stay friends forever. i thought every goodbye was temporary.

i thought every ending was actually a pause. children are fascinating because they mistake permanence for reality. adults do the opposite. we mistake impermanence for reality. maybe both are wrong.

maybe life exists somewhere in between.

lately i have been thinking about a particular evening from years ago. nothing happened. that is the strange part. nothing happened. i was sitting on a balcony eating a dark chocolate my best friend gave me. the neighborhood was quiet. someone was playing music far away. a dog barked. the sun was beginning to set. and if you had asked me then whether this moment mattered, i would have laughed. of course it didn’t matter. it was just another day. just another summer evening.

just another chocolate. just another sunset. but memory is a strange curator. it doesn’t preserve achievements. it preserves feelings. years later i cannot tell you what i learned in school that month. i cannot tell you what exam i was studying for. i cannot tell you what day it was. i remember the chocolate. i remember my best friend from years ago. i remember the sunlight. i remember the feeling of existing without urgency. maybe that is what adulthood steals first. not joy. not innocence.

urgency. the constant awareness that time is moving.

when i was younger, time felt horizontal. now it feels vertical. as though every day is falling through me. one moment i am thirteen. the next i am eighteen. the next i am twenty. the next june arrives. the next june arrives. the next june arrives.

and suddenly the years are stacking themselves into something i can no longer ignore.

sometimes i see children outside and feel a grief so specific it is difficult to explain. not because i want to be them. god, no. i don’t actually want to go back. there are versions of myself i survived for a reason. but i look at them and think: you have no idea. you have no idea how quickly this becomes memory. you have no idea that one day you will spend entire evenings trying to remember the layout of your childhood bedroom. you have no idea that one day certain songs will make your chest ache. you have no idea that entire people will disappear from your life. you have no idea that the future you are so desperate for will arrive and immediately become the past. you have no idea that growing up is mostly learning how to grieve things that are still technically alive.

the house is still standing. the friendship still exists. your hometown is still there. your parents are still your parents. but something has shifted. something has moved half an inch to the left. and suddenly you realize you can never go home in the way you once could. i think that’s what nostalgia really is. not remembering. mourning.

svetlana boym wrote that nostalgia is a longing for a home that no longer exists or perhaps never existed. i think about that often because the older i get, the more i suspect that i am not nostalgic for my childhood itself. i am nostalgic for how it felt. i miss believing life was about to begin. i miss not knowing certain things. i miss the version of me who could spend entire afternoons looking at clouds and feel productive. i miss the way summer used to stretch. i miss boredom. god, i miss boredom.

children complain about being bored because they do not understand its luxury.

boredom is proof that time belongs to you. now every moment seems monetized, optimized, scheduled, documented. even rest has become a project. even hobbies have become content. even joy has become performance. sometimes i wonder if half of adulthood is simply learning how to protect your wonder from efficiency. and maybe that’s why summer affects me so much. because it reminds me of a version of living that felt slower. not easier. just slower. there is a difference.

people often romanticize childhood. i don’t. childhood was lonely sometimes. childhood was confusing. childhood was full of fears that felt enormous. but childhood possessed one thing adulthood consistently struggles to replicate: presence.

a child can spend forty minutes watching an ant carry a leaf. an adult checks their phone every twelve seconds. a child enters a day. an adult manages it. and every summer i become aware of this loss all over again. the tragedy is not that we grow older. the tragedy is how often we stop paying attention. maybe this essay is really about attention. maybe nostalgia is simply attention directed backwards. maybe grief is love with nowhere to land. maybe growing up is learning how to love things without possessing them. i don’t know.

i think the worst part about growing up is realizing that nothing leaves all at once. people talk about loss as though it arrives dramatically. a slammed door. a final goodbye. a funeral. a breakup text. some enormous event that splits your life into before and after. but most losses arrive quietly.

they leave in fractions. in percentages. in tiny, almost invisible thefts.

you do not wake up one morning and discover your childhood is gone. you wake up one morning and realize you haven’t spoken to your best friend from eighth grade in three years. you wake up one morning and realize your mother has started asking you how to work the television. you wake up one morning and realize your father makes a small sound when he sits down now. you wake up one morning and discover that the neighborhood kids are younger than you remember. then younger. then impossibly younger. and eventually you realize you are no longer standing at the center of your memories. you are standing outside them. looking in. like someone pressing their face against a window.

i think about old friendships a lot during summer. maybe because summers used to belong to friendship. there were summers where my entire emotional ecosystem revolved around people i no longer speak to. people whose birthdays i once memorized. people whose houses i could navigate in complete darkness. people whose parents knew my favorite snacks. people i was convinced would remain in my life forever.

haha! forever is such a funny word. children use it constantly. adults rarely do. not because adults are cynical but because we know better. we understand that forever usually means until graduation. until distance. until someone’s priorities shift. until a misunderstanding neither person knows how to fix. until life happens.

i wish someone had told me that losing friends can hurt as much as losing lovers. sometimes more. at least heartbreak has language. songs, movies, poems. entire libraries dedicated to romantic loss.

friendship endings happen in silence. no one teaches you how to grieve the girl who knew every version of you. the boy who made you laugh until your stomach hurt. the group chat that slowly stopped lighting up. the inside jokes that no longer belong anywhere. sometimes i scroll through old photos and feel like an archaeologist excavating evidence of a civilization that disappeared. there we are. smiling. certain of ourselves. certain of each other. completely unaware of the future. and i want to reach through the screen and tell us all the same thing: pay attention!!!!!!!!

---

the thing I have been trying to say this entire time..

the thing hidden underneath all this nostalgia. underneath the grief. underneath the summers and the sunsets and the versions of myself i can no longer return to.

i have been wondering if growing up is mostly a process of misidentifying what is happening to us.

when i was fifteen, i thought loneliness was destroying me. when i was seventeen, i thought uncertainty was destroying me. when i was nineteen, i thought heartbreak was destroying me. every year there seemed to be some new thing threatening to pull me under. some new ache. some new fear. some new evidence that i was falling behind everyone else. and because i was inside the experience, i couldn’t see it clearly.

that is the difficult thing about suffering. you never know what it is building while it is happening. you only see the wreckage. you never see the architecture. i think about my first heartbreak often. not because i am still trapped there or i haven’t moved on but because that version of me genuinely believed her life was ending. she walked around carrying grief like a second skeleton. every song hurt. every sunset hurt. every memory hurt. even happiness hurt. especially happiness. because happiness reminded her of what had been lost. and if I could speak to her now, i wouldn’t tell her it was going to be okay.

i hate when people say that.

“everything happens for a reason.”

“it gets better.”

“you’ll find someone else.”

those sentences always felt too small for the size of the wound.

instead i think i would tell her this:

you have no idea who this pain is making you. you have absolutely no idea. you think you’re learning how to lose someone. what you’re actually learning is how to survive yourself. you think you’re learning how to let go. what you’re actually learning is how to remain.

years later, i can trace entire parts of my personality back to things that once felt unbearable. the empathy. the softness. the way i notice people. the way i write. the way i love. the way i understand loneliness when i see it in someone else’s eyes.

none of those things arrived despite my suffering. many of them arrived because of it. and i know that sounds dangerous. i know people romanticize pain far too often. i am not saying suffering is beautiful. most suffering is boring. most suffering is repetitive. it is crying in bathrooms. staring at ceilings. re-reading the same conversations. walking around grocery stores feeling strangely empty. it is ordinary.

but ordinary things shape us too. the truth is that every difficult thing i have experienced has left something behind. not always something good. not always something i wanted. but something.

the friendship that broke my heart taught me that love is not measured by duration. the loneliness taught me how to enjoy my own company. the rejection taught me that my worth could not depend entirely on being chosen. the uncertainty taught me humility. the grief taught me tenderness. even the mistakes taught me something.

especially the mistakes honestly.

i spent years believing growth would feel noble. that personal development would arrive with dramatic music and inspiring speeches and obvious transformations. instead it arrived looking suspiciously like failure. like confusion. like heartbreak. like sitting alone on my bedroom floor wondering what the hell i was supposed to do next.

growth is deeply unglamorous. most of the time it just feels like your life is falling apart. then years pass. and suddenly you realize the thing you thought was breaking you was actually rebuilding you. not into someone invincible or someone fearless. just into someone capable. capable of carrying more. capable of loving more wisely. capable of surviving things that once would have shattered you.

this is not the triumphant ending i wanted when i was younger. i wanted certainty. i wanted guarantees. i wanted the universe to promise me that if i suffered enough, i would eventually be rewarded. but life doesn’t work like that.

some wounds never become wisdom. some losses remain losses. some people leave and there is no grand lesson hidden inside their absence.

and yet.

and yet.

i look back at every version of myself and i feel something i never expected. not embarrassment. not regret. gratitude, for the girl who loved too hard. for the girl who trusted the wrong people. for the girl who stayed up crying at four in the morning. for the girl who thought she was drowning because she kept going. because she woke up the next day anyway. because she carried me here.

i think that is what adulthood has taught me more than anything else. resilience rarely feels heroic while it is happening. most resilience looks like brushing your teeth after your heart is broken. answering texts when you’re sad. doing the dishes while grieving. continuing. continuing. continuing.

the world teaches us to admire people after they’ve survived something. but the miracle is not survival. the miracle is persistence. the miracle is the ordinary decision to keep participating in your own life. and maybe that is why summer feels so emotional to me. because every june is evidence.

evidence that i made it through another year. evidence that the things i thought would destroy me didn’t. evidence that life kept unfolding. evidence that i kept unfolding too.

sometimes i still feel behind. sometimes i still feel lost. sometimes i still miss people i shouldn’t. sometimes i still stare at the ceiling at two in the morning wondering whether i am becoming the person i am supposed to be. but i no longer mistake those feelings for failure because i know something now that i didn’t know then.

the water was never trying to kill me. the water was teaching me. every heartbreak. every goodbye. every lonely summer. every mistake. every ending. every version of grief. all of it quietly teaching me how to stay afloat. all of it teaching me how to swim.

ANDREA SERIO

this is where i want to leave this. not with a lesson or advice. not with one of those neat conclusions that ties everything together in a bow and pretends life is something that can be understood. i don’t think life works like that. i think life is mostly a series of unfinished thoughts. a collection of people we never stop missing. questions we never stop asking. versions of ourselves we never completely outgrow.

i started writing this because it was summer. because june arrived the way it always does, carrying its box of old memories. because i walked outside one evening and the air smelled exactly the way it did when i was thirteen. because somewhere in the distance children were laughing. because the sunlight looked familiar. because for a moment i felt time collapse.

and suddenly every summer i have ever lived existed at once. the girl eating lychees in her grandmother’s kitchen. the girl staying up too late talking to friends she thought she’d know forever. the girl falling in love. the girl getting her heart broken. the girl trying to become someone. the girl writing this now. all of them standing beside each other. all of them equally real. equally temporary. and perhaps that is what i have spent years misunderstanding.

for so long i thought the purpose of life was to arrive somewhere. to become wiser. stronger. healed. finished. but i don’t think we ever arrive. i think we just keep becoming. i think we spend our entire lives meeting new versions of ourselves. then grieving them when they leave. then meeting another. and another. and another.

until one day we realize that the person we have been searching for was never waiting at the finish line. she was all the versions along the way. even the broken ones. especially the broken ones.

because lately i’ve been thinking about something strange. something that feels almost impossible to admit. there are things hurting me right now that i know i will miss one day. not the pain itself. but the life surrounding it. one day i will miss being this age. one day i will miss this bedroom. this face. this exact arrangement of people in my life. one day i will miss texting the people i love. i will miss hearing my parents’ voices from another room. i will miss having my whole future ahead of me, even when the future terrifies me. i will miss the questions i currently wish i had answers to.

one day i will miss this summer. even the lonely parts. even the confusing parts. even the parts i am rushing through. and that realization has changed something in me.

life rarely changes dramatically. but quietly. the way seasons change. the way daylight lingers a little longer every evening before you notice. the way a person becomes older without seeing it happen. i find myself pausing more. standing in doorways longer. lingering in conversations. watching sunsets all the way through instead of leaving halfway.

trying — failing, but trying — to pay attention.

because i think the secret isn’t learning how to hold onto things. it is learning how to notice them while they’re here. to understand that this, too, is the good old days. not someday. now. this moment. this ordinary sunday. this messy room. this unfinished life.

if nostalgia has taught me anything, it is this:

the things that break our hearts are often the things that prove we had one. the summers we mourn are proof that we lived them. the people we miss are proof that we loved them. the versions of ourselves we grieve are proof that we were brave enough to change. and perhaps the title of this essay was true all along.

everything you thought was drowning you was teaching you how to swim.

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if you’re reading this somewhere warm, somewhere summer is pressing its golden fingerprints against the glass, think of me for a second.

i’ll be doing the same thing i’ve always done.

trying to pay attention.

see you in the next one.