Have you ever felt like you are drowning under the weight of life.

For many of my years have I felt the way that you describe. I have faced a long road the same as so many others, and I personally feel that the key is not to actively try to "rise above it" as you say, but to learn to accept what life has to offer us in the moment and do the best we can to the absolute peak of our abilities on a day to day basis. The struggle I feel, is what makes it such a painful experience for us and I am sure others will agree. Resistance hurts.

Once we accept our situation for what it is, my opinion is that we are better able to deal with it in a meaningful way. When you bring a negative emotion such as sorrow and despair to any sort of situation, it is most likely going to affect you and those around you by bringing that low to everything around it, further perpetuating the feeling of being lost.

On the other hand, I think that if we can do our best to "CONTINUALLY" bring that positive vibe to any situation we may encounter, it can (and in my experiences will) send those same feelings into more corners of our life than we are currently aware of through your own actions and those of others.

I have always looked at magnets as a metaphor for our lives. You can push negative ends together as much as you like, but the harder you fight the harder it fights back. When we reverse the polarities of thought, things seem to snap together with ease.

Try implementing new strategies in your life in a "POSITIVE" manner. As bad of a place you may be in right now, you are never alone in feeling that way.

When you are lost, try to find positivity in the outsourcing of your thoughts to others, I think you may be surprised at the results.

Yes! I'm 20 years old. I have no money to pay for college, and I'm hugely in debt. I don't have the security of knowing I'll have a job to pay off my loans when I leave school and due to my own faults I have less than stellar grades. For the past 3 years since I've moved to college, very little has been stable in my life: my relationship with my parents and brothers disintegrated, my high school friends moved away, I've changed my major 4 times, and I had the misfortune of loving a guy who dragged me through a miserable and unhealthy relationship that still effects me to this day. Now, I'm on the brink of starting all over again, with a new classes and new roommates I barely know. I wish one thing in my life was stable, and I feel like I'm drowning, too. I might not have your problems, or be able to help you with your problems, but you're not alone in feeling overwhelmed.

yes. i feel that way alot - maybe even most of the time. in fact, i was just recently asking 'oh, my god - how can i be in the same place all over again?!' kinda like harlequin 'romance' novels - the characters' names are different, the setting & cover pics change from one book to another - but the story's pretty much the same. i think we attract to us in life the situations and relationships that will teach us what we need to learn and give us the opportunity to have a positive impact on the lives of others. of course, sometimes, stuff just happens, but when i find myself in a 'challenging' situation, i try to figure out why it exists in my life at that time. is there some lesson i need to learn? some skill i need to acquire? is it even about me? maybe i'm there for somebody else - maybe someone else needs my support, or needs me to set an example, or teach them something. i think, too, that, ultimately, how we feel about wherever we are in life is not so much about what happens TO us, but about how we RECEIVE it and WHERE we take it. i hope that you feel better soon about whatever is going on in your life - don't drown. :) feel free to buzz me if you'd like to talk. lise

Yeah feel that way all the time.