Unpopular opinion:
I’ve always hated hot showers. Hot baths. Any forced immersion into warmth that isn’t earned through movement or emotion. It’s like trying to trick your body into comfort, a false flag operation that never quite succeeds. By the time you adapt, by the time your cells stop screaming about the temperature differential, the water’s already shifting, cooling, leaving you to chase that ephemeral moment of adjustment that never quite arrives.
This morning’s unexpected phone call still echoes in my ears, a voice from a past I’d carefully filed away in the “do not disturb” section of my memory. Each word, though kind and careful, stirred up sediment I’d allowed to settle, like stepping into a clear pool only to watch the bottom cloud with forgotten debris. The board members in my head—Anxiety, Depression, BPD, and their ever-rotating cast of understudies—immediately called an emergency meeting. Quorum was reached before the second ring faded.
Motion passes unanimously: Retreat. Hibernate. Dissociate.
But here I am, standing in rain that feels like it’s being thrown from heaven’s balcony by frustrated angels. Each droplet carries its own miniature parachutist, screaming through the void between clouds and earth. My clothes are soaked through, and for once, my external temperature matches my internal chaos. There’s something poetic about that, something that makes the board members shuffle their papers nervously.
The hot tub churns, its surface disturbed by rain and mechanics, steam rising like spirits escaping purgatory. It’s a perfect metaphor for my mind—a controlled environment of artificial warmth surrounded by natural cold, constantly fighting entropy, constantly losing heat to the atmosphere while trying to maintain its prescribed temperature.
I step in.
The sensation is overwhelming, like every nerve ending has suddenly remembered it has a job to do and is making up for lost time. Hot and cold wage war across my skin—rain on my face, heat climbing up my legs. The board members are in chaos. Anxiety demands an immediate exit strategy. Depression suggests sinking to the bottom. BPD is simultaneously writing love poetry to and plotting revenge against the experience.
But something unexpected happens in this thermal battleground. The contrast creates a kind of clarity, like the fog on my mental windshield is being wiped away one conflicting sensation at a time. The rain continues its ice-crystal assault from above while the heat rises from below, and I find myself suspended between these extremes, remarkably present in a moment that should, by all accounts, be unbearable.
Isn’t this what therapy has been trying to teach me? That comfort often lies not in the absence of extremes, but in finding your balance between them? That adaptation isn’t about reaching a perfect temperature, but about learning to exist in the space where hot meets cold, where past meets present, where comfort meets discomfort?
The board members grow quieter, their emergency meeting devolving into a thoughtful symposium on the nature of contradictions. The rain feels less like daggers now and more like a gentle reminder that nature, like emotions, doesn’t always need to make sense to be beautiful.
I sink deeper into the hot tub, letting the war between temperatures rage around me. The phone call that sent me spiraling now seems less like an invasion and more like another contrasting element in this strange experiment in existing. Like this hot tub in a cold rain, maybe some experiences aren’t meant to be resolved but simply witnessed, felt, acknowledged in their beautiful contradiction.
The steam continues to rise, carrying with it the rigid expectations of how I should process discomfort. And for once, the board members don’t call for an immediate vote on fight or flight. Instead, they sit back, watching the steam dance with the rain, taking notes on how opposing forces can create something unexpectedly peaceful.
I stay until my fingers prune, until the hot and cold find their temporary treaty on my skin. And when I finally emerge, I carry with me a new understanding: sometimes the most profound comfort comes not from avoiding the extremes, but from learning to float between them, letting them reshape your understanding of what balance can be.
