Depression can appear as calm waves, slowly crashing into the shore with little to no effort at all. The waves are continuous—something that parallels with depression. There’s no "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. It’s just there—the company that walked in completely unannounced and decided that leaving is all too simple. Depression wakes up next to you in the morning, sits on your shoulder during the day, and tucks you into bed at night.

One minute, all of this is true, but then the switch flips and all of a sudden those carefree waves aren’t so subtle. The tides become rough and transform into a hasty storm. Before you know it, you’re getting sucked under an unpredictable riptide—spun, flipped, tumbled. It’s all too real to someone with depression. Everything is moving so quickly and you’re just trying to keep from suffocating. You’re struggling to breathe while the world that’s right above the surface keeps on turning. The ocean, however, still looks truly beautiful from the shore, right? Yet, you’re still confined to that undertow and there’s no controlling its course. Its strength is overbearing and ruthless, making it hard to fight back with tons of weight pushing down on you. It all seems like too much.

Much like being a captive to the ocean’s harsh riptides, depression is physically exhausting and, quite frankly, you feel like you’ve had enough. While the physical burdens of being tortured by the ocean’s reigns are much greater than those of depression, there’s still a correlation with depression’s effects of hopelessness, isolation and exhaustion.

There’s fear in your blurry eyes, and you come to the realization that the depression that wakes up next to you in the morning, sits on your shoulder during the day, and tucks you into bed at night is the biggest nightmare you never imagined. You can’t get comfortable with it and you never do. Everything around you is disfigured and flawed and nothing seems to matter. Negativity swarms your mind and swallows you up whole without second-guessing. Your own mind lies to you, and, given enough time, you start to believe every single one of those damn lies.

At critical points, it’s as if you’re drifting around all alone in the ocean’s depths and you can’t find a way to resurface. You feel too small and too useless drifting in a place that’s too big. All that surrounding salt becomes the tears in your eyes because it’s everything and nothing all at once, and maybe floating away doesn’t sound too bad after all.

When the rough tides calm, you see the rays of light beaming down on the salty waves and you head to the shore where it’s safe. The storm has passed—maybe not forever, but at least for now. It’s a good feeling and you soak these days in while you can. There are few things better than being able to feel a sense of hope when you’re tied to depression, even if it’s just for a split second.

Most people, if not everyone, can agree that the ocean is a remarkably beautiful aspect of nature. Well, nothing about depression in itself is beautiful—absolutely nothing. Being someone who’s at constant war with his or her mind and is struggling for a will to live isn’t beautiful and it most certainly isn’t something to romanticize. While depression isn’t beautiful, the strength you have to keep fighting your mind every day is, so take the waves day by day and fight the storm no matter how many times your mind wants you to sink.