I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka “raptures of the deep”
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you’re good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here’s what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they’re not dying, they’re not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he’d told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he’s at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can’t go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
I spent so much of my life romanticizing the Great and Powerful Enormity of the Sea, reading about the salt and the sweat of the sailors straining to haul the sails or anchor while dreading the monsters in the cold, icy deep fathoms below…and now you tell me that a fathom is only 6 feet deep -
Six feet is still more than enough for a grave.
Hi, that is the most metal addition you could have possibly made to this post
For every fathom you descend into the ocean the pressure around you increases. By five fathoms down you’re experiencing two atmospheres of pressure. At about ten fathoms, a human can no longer survive on their own, and must have supplemental oxygen to continue their descent. With specialized diving gear, we can go to perhaps 60 fathoms under our own power. By that depth, even the clearest waters are dark. Perhaps one percent of visible light remains, mostly in the blue range. The water is blues and greys around you, shadowy like the last minutes before nightfall. The water below is darker still, impenetrable. But life still lurks beneath you, in the untold fathoms of the darkest sea, in an environment so hostile even our machines struggle to reach them.
Can we just… normalize teens loving their parents? Like obviously you’re not obligated to if your parents are shitty, but damn, I love my mom. She’s there for me all the time and sure we have rough patches but honestly she’s the greatest. Like. We need teens to know that they don’t have to hate their parents just cause.
It must be nice to come from a nonabusive family. One that doesn’t traumatized every emotional interaction to the point where you drive away any sign of love as a form of manipulation because that’s all that you were raised with. 🤷♀️
It is.
Reading Comprehension
but loving ur parents is already normalized and its the kids w/ abusive parents that actually have to deal with misunderstandings and ignorance from others regarding this topic.
Hey there, I’m talking about the trope where it’s seen as super uncool to like your parents that was literally pushed on teens through the media since the culture shift in the early 60s. The post has nothing to do with abusive parents. I was abused as a kid and honestly if the trope where teens have to hate their parents to be cool died, then kids with actual abusive parents would have an easier time recognizing abuse this has been a psa
“if the trope where teens have to hate their parents to be cool died, then kids with actual abusive parents would have an easier time recognizing abuse”
Teen with abusive parents: I hate my parents
Teen influenced by society: Me too mine are the worst
The takeaway for teen 1: This is normal and it’s supposed to be this way
The takeaway for teen 2: My friend’s parents are like mine
The takeaway for any adult listening: All kids who complain about their parents are just being rebellious
