When Every River Tries to Become the Ocean

There’s a kind of pressure moving through the world today
that I don’t think our souls were designed to hold.

It’s the pressure to be everything.

Not just to live our own lives, but to scale them—
to expand our stories, our identities, our presence, our coherence—to the size of an ocean.

Some days, I feel it in my chest before I feel it in my thoughts.
A kind of swelling.
A sense that I’m carrying more than my waters can hold.

And the image that keeps coming back to me is this:

A river trying to become the ocean.

That’s what it feels like now—
as if each of us is expected to grow larger and deeper than our natural width;
as if our lives aren’t enough
unless they’re global or visible or endlessly expanding.

A river has shape.
Direction.
Banks that give it form.

But when a river tries to become the ocean,
it loses everything that makes it a river.

It floods.
It breaks its own edges.
It carries debris it was never meant to hold.

I’ve lived that breaking.

In the years after my marriage ended—
trying to be enough for my kids, enough for the world, enough for myself.

When I was diagnosed with my glioma
and the smallest tasks suddenly felt ocean-sized.

When I entered social platforms
and felt the quiet expectation that my reflections must scale to matter.

And even now — working in a small kitchen,
washing dishes in the rhythm of someone else’s schedule—
I still catch myself expanding beyond my edges.

I don’t know when it happened,
but somewhere along the way
we all started believing our lives needed to be larger than their natural flow.

That our river wasn’t enough.
That we had to become the whole water.

But I’m learning—slowly, and sometimes painfully—
that a river is sacred because of its limits.

Because it moves in coherence with its own world.
Because it doesn’t carry more than it can move.

Because it reaches the ocean by being what it is, not by trying to become what it isn’t.

When I expand beyond my own banks, I don’t become more—I drift.

And drift feels like motion, but it’s a quiet kind of losing:
Losing direction.
Losing depth.
Losing the rhythm that makes my life mine.

But what I am rediscovering,
what this season keeps teaching me—
is that my life flows best when I let myself be a river again.

Bounded.
Honest.
Directional.
Rooted in the land that formed me.

I don’t need to be vast.
I don’t need to be everywhere.
I don’t need to be everything.

I just need to be coherent—a river moving in the truth of its own motion.

The ocean doesn’t need me to become it.
It only asks that I flow toward it in the way only I can.

And that, I think, is enough.